The Daily Grind 381

There are 11,000 people at Tech Ed, but I'm guessing that I still have readers who stayed home. So, I'll be covering Tech Ed news here, along with everything else.

Software

• Visual Studio 2005 Team System - This was the big keynote announcement for Tech Ed (and incidentally, it proves that Microsoft can keep a secret when it really wants to). New source code control, new testing bits, code coverage, software lifecycle support, and other changes here are designed to make VS2K5 more useful for team development without third party tools. There's a lot to dig into here. Microsoft's New Source Code Control Application, from Korby Parnell, covers that part of the story. Dominic Hopton's weblog has a batch of posts on the test bits, including some advice for getting the latest Community Technical Preview drop of VS2K5 actually working. There's also a weblog for the profiler team, whenever they get around to posting to it. The code analysis team has a weblog too. Finally, if you're an MSDN subscriber, you can go download the latest Community Technology Preview drop. Well, if you're an MSDN subscriber with a fast net connection, anyhow; at 2.5GB, I'm not going to be hauling it in here.
• Web Services Enhancements 2.0 - Security, policy, and other standards implementations for Web services. We've gone well past the point where every developer needs to be familiar with this goop, but if Web services are in your strategic near-term future, you need to take a look at this.
• Active Directory to ADAM Synchronizer Beta - If you're using ADAM to provide directory services for an application, you can now populate your directory with info from the "real" Active Directory for the domain.
• BDV Notepad - Another free replacement for Windows Notepad, this one offering dockable toolbars, multilevel undo, URL awareness, and other extensions to the basics.
• xinorbis2 - Another tool for viewing hard drive usage, this one with a mix of graphs, tables, and trees to let you slice and dice the info in numerous ways.
• Threat Modeling Tool - GUI application to create XML files representing the results of a detailed security analysis. You could create such files with any XML editor, of course, but the help file here is a valuable source of guidance for thinking about the security threats to your application. Freeware from Microsoft.
• Exchange Intelligent Message Filter - Server-side spam filtering from Microsoft, now out for the hoi polloi.

Information

• Programming with Web Services Enhancements 2.0 - Good overview of what's in WSE 2.0.

Community

• Lindows, Microsoft Case Heads to Trial - Microsoft probably would have preferred that this news not come out on Tech Ed launch day. Basically, the 9th Circus Court of Appeals said that the trademark infringement case against Lindows, which could potentially yank the trademark status for "Windows", can go ahead.
• Hatteras - Eric Sink (the guy who runs SourceGear) gives an informed ISV's view of the new VS2K5TS threat. As he points out, Microsoft is really aiming at IBM/Rational, and pricing for the new source code control system is likely to be substantial.

Rants

• CTS200: Service Orientation and the Developer - Tim Sneath reports on a Don Box/Doug Purdy session at Tech Ed: "The central concept of the session was the following: 'There is only one program and it is still being written'. Everything you work on is part of one fundamental program - you provide functionality to other pieces of that program. The idea of a closed system is effectively dead, so our development practices need to take account of this change. Service Orientation brings tremendous value to the distributed space." This is, of course, crap. Yes, on one level you can view much of the software in the world as being a single interconnected system (though it's trivially simple to see that this does not apply to all software; think about the embedded market, for example). But except in limited edge cases, this is not a useful way to think about writing software. Consider the analogous statement "there is only one book and it is still being written." No one would leap from that to the idea that every book needs to consider the things that have appeared in every other book. Service Orientation is sexy this year, but like all the other programming fads, it won't be the last -- or the only -- thing that you need to learn. 
• When Couples Hit the Road, Relationships Hit the Rocks - News flash: men and women behave differently when it comes to asking directions. And that might cause them to be crabby with each other on long vacations. So, everyone should buy Microsoft Streets & Trips 2004. Oh, come on. Can you imagine a lamer marketing campaign? (Well, OK, the use of "ActiveX" to refer to every piece of code in the company was pretty bad, but that was years ago.)

Mike Gunderloyy is the lead developer for Larkware and author of numerous books and articles on programming topics.

Home