Eric Sink takes a long, long time to say the following (learn to let go, Chris [1]…):

“The following is an example of one of the most common questions I get from developers who are creating a brand new software company:

“Where can I find a partner to be a co-founder and handle the business side of things?

“My answer: Don’t.

…

“Do all that stuff yourself. You need the experience anyway. If you really want a partner, don’t find an MBA, find another geek like yourself. Don’t be afraid to allow your company to be very developer-centric for a very long time. By doing it this way, you’ll avoid a lot of problems and you’ll learn a lot.”

Like agile programming, Eric has just given us permission to do what we want to do anyway. Wahoo!

[1] One of my favorite duties at MSDN used to be developmental editing on Eric’s writing. I used to love how he’d work certain things into his piece, e.g. the thing my 9-year old son posts on his door, modulo s/Geeks/Boys and s/MBAs/Girls.

Gene Webb, Microsoft developer evangelist, has posted the recorded LiveMeeting Indigo SDR (Software Design Review) dry-run videos and slides. And as if that weren’t enough, you can see Steve Swartz, Indigo Architect, give an intro to Indigo on MSDN TV.

I remember a day when SDRs were deep, secret mojo that even folks that knew about them were special, let along actually attending them. Now, we’re posting them on the internet. I love my company.

[from Aaron Skonnard]

My new group, DSG, is hiring:

• Program Manager
• Software Development Engineer

“Join the Model Engine team and help make modeling a core feature of the Microsoft distributed application platform. We’re building an engine and repository that supports a broad range of model domains, from the way we describe the structure of programs and data to the way that pieces of an application work together across machines and platforms. Using models makes it quicker to write programs, simpler to evolve them, and easier to analyze them. Model-driven development represents a major and fundamental shift in the way that software is built and managed; our team is chartered to bring those benefits to the people who are using our platform.”

Submit your resume today!

RegexDesigner has been updated to v1.1 with support for replacement patterns, national and special symbol support, Ctrl+Tab hotkey support, updated highlighting support for color blind users, Ctrl+A support and the use of a bullet instead of @ for matched whitespace. Thanks to Victor Serbin for putting this update together from source contributed to the GDN workspace.

You can hear Omri sing a few bars of “These are a few of my favorite things” to the tune of Indigo.

In case you missed it yesterday, Don Box and Andrew Layman, two of Microsoft's top thinkers, proposed a means of increasing XML performance by looking into areas of technology outside the core domain of XML.

“I first heard about it at a Seattle area Starbucks. I mean, I was just like sitting there drinking my Venti no-whip triple shot soy latte and I looked over at this dude sitting next to me who was working on a laptop and I saw something on his screen. So I said “Dude is that the new version of Eclipse?” and he said “No, it’s Visual Studio 2005 Linux Edition″. Then he typed a few lines of code and created an Indigo service that runs on the Apache web server. I was like “Dude!” and almost spilled my latte.”
–Anonymous Seattle Youth

“We still believe that Java is a strong language for development. However, we will no longer continue to build on that technology preferring instead to move developers to .NET.”
–Anonymous Sun Representative

I’m sure you’ve heard the uproar about “saving VB6” by now. Since I’m not a member of the VB programmer community, I don’t feel qualified to judge them, their tools or their plight.

However, I am a charter member of the COM community, so when I hear about Microsoft’s plans to halt the support for IDL, I get burning mad! Save IDL! Sign the petition! Viva la IDL!