Ah, the bittersweet memories:

“Maybe you have heard some of the stories about the [DevelopMentor] Brains? Brian Randell delivered a VSLive conference talk in a bath robe. Don Box delivered a conference talk in Amsterdam naked from the waist down. Chris Sells, not to be outdone, agreed to pose completely nude for an advertisement in a technical magazine whose readership is 95% male.”

It wasn’t an ad, actually. It was an official photo shoot for an article. Most of the pictures were normal, but they had to pick the naked one (although they did airbrush out the nipples and go another way for the cover : ).

Barry Kouda, Barracuda.NET’s most recent hire, lists some of the other DevelopMentor alumni in a loving “where are they now” kind of way.

There’s a smart client app that I’ve found myself using more and more and loving it: robocopy. The UI for robocopy sucks, of course. It’s a command line app with a myriad of options that take experimentation to really figure out, but once it’s started, it works like a champ, providing progress on each file and, most importantly, retrying once it loses it’s network connection.

What this allows me to do is set up long copy operations bringing down the latest internal Longhorn builds (which are huge) over my uncertain VPN connection. When I hibernate my box, I don’t worry about Robocopy dropping bits or getting confused and when I lose my internet or VPN connection, it retires 1 *million* times before giving up, which gives me plenty of time to notice and reestablish the connection.

Slap a friendlier UI on Robocopy and you’ve got a wonderful smart client citizen that should be emulated.

According to Computerworld, Don Norman, the design engineer famous for such works as “The Design of Everyday Things,” is consulting on Longhorn UI design. Cool! I especially love this statement:

“This is not the ‘computer age’ any more; this is the age of very smart chips hooked into a huge worldwide network. Infrastructure is about sharing.” This means two or more incompatible ways of doing things is counterproductive.

I love his characterization of client computers as “smart chips,” i.e. storing services and data production on the server, although the “smarts” of the client is important, too, i.e. data visualization and manipulation (which is death with a round-trip per click).

In Ian Griffith’s latest post, he shows 3 identical (to my eye) upper case Os next to each other and says, “[t]his clearly shows the shortcomings of that implementation” like a normal human can tell the difference!

The funny thing is, I’ve actually noticed that ClearType on Longhorn was generally better, although I never knew if that was my imagination or not. The thing I love about Ian is that he takes that vague sense of “this seems better” to “let me show you why it’s better and I’ll show you my own implementation of ClearType as a comparison just for fun.” What’s not to love? : )

Hypothetically, if you were a relatively well-known voice in the Windows development community (let’s call her Kris) and you were being pursued as a series editor for two publishers, call them O’Shawnasee Associated (OSA) and Anderson-Manderson (AM), which would you pick?

Suppose that both OSA and AM have a strong existing Windows presence, but AM has the edge in a quality .NET series with a strong voice already at the helm (call her Dawn) while OSA has a more scattered offering spread across format and media types. Would it be better for Windows developers if Kris lent her voice to the AM existing series, reducing the competition for authors between series, or should she work with OSA to gather their Windows editorial vision into a more cohesive whole, requiring developers to make a harder choice between publishers?

I know that this question is hypothetical and holds no importance in any pending decisions by anyone real, but I’m still curious about your thoughts. Please post your comments here.

After weeks of trying research, floating his thoughts on his blog and taking feedback from the blogging community (including several Microsoft folks), Jon Udell has posted an Infoworld article digging into the pillars of Longhorn (Avalon, Indigo and WinFS) and grading them on their implications. He summarizes nicely, I think:

“Indigo, by virtue of its developer-friendly simplification of Web services protocols, could propel Microsoft into the forefront of enterprise middleware. Although Longhorn’s use of Indigo will focus on networks of Windows peers, the technology isn’t bound to Longhorn. Expect to see Indigo-powered ‘enterprise service bus’ offerings from Microsoft and partners.”

“If WinFS succeeds in delivering improvements in users’ ability to organize and manage local information, enterprises looking to drive productivity up — and support costs down — will want it. The wild card will be the level of support for legacy document formats and emerging XML formats. Benefits that accrue only to new WinFS-aware applications won’t tip the scale.”

“Avalon’s TV-like ‘presentation experiences’ clearly favor the home entertainment center over the business desktop. An accelerated convergence of voice, video, and data could alter that equation, and Avalon is designed to help drive that convergence. But enterprises concerned about reach and lock-in will need to carefully evaluate the trade-offs.”

I think that Jon’s nails the tensions involved in Indigo and WinFS, but misses the boat on Avalon, which represents a much-needed overhaul of our aging presentation sub-system and enables a host of applications that we need to visualize and manipulate the ever increasing amount of data with which we deal. Of course, the existing presentation stack will continue to work just fine, but for those applications that need it, Avalon will be a god send. As we progress over the next decade, more and more apps are going to need what Avalon provides.

However, while I don’t agree with every that Jon says, but I do appreciate the thoroughness that went into his opinions. Folks involved in Longhorn, both inside and outside of Microsoft, should take a look.

According to legend, half the Windows XP BSODs are 3rd party driver crashes, reducing our “trustworthiness” to the user (trust is more than security and privacy). Yesterday, DevSource reported on a new driver model in Longhorn that will isolate the OS from driver crashes and simplify the development platform to reduce crashes in the first place. Amen, brother.

[via Dactylmatrix]

Tim Sneath has a nice, concise list of what’s new in Windows Forms 2.0. By far and away, ClickOnce deployment as an order of magnitude improvement over No-Touch Deployment is my favorite advance, but the new controls are cool (you can drop the standard buttons on the menu and toolstrips from the context menu), the BackgroundWorker is very cool (and eliminates about 2/3rds of the code in my threading chapter) and the designer layout assistance for helping with the layout and spacing of controls sounds like it'll reduce a bunch of monkey work in the designer.