The Daily Grind 396

Running some numbers this morning convinced me that the garlic-of-the-month club won't fly as a business plan. Back to programming, I guess.

Software

• viWord - vi keybindings for Microsoft Word. Ack. (via Gammatron)
• VBParser - Scanner and parser for the Visual Basic
• NewsAloud - Voice RSS reader. I can think of some interesting combinations of this technology with portable devices for taking your RSS along with you. (via Lockergnome)
• VSTabs - Gradient-filled combined tabs for use in Visual Studio .NET. (via PowerToys)
• Today Weather - Weather software for the Pocket PC. (via Paschal L)

Information

• Building installers for PocketPC 2000 and PocketPC 2002 using Visual Studio .NET 2003 - Useful info if you have .NET CF applications to distribute. PDF document.

Community

• Unit Testing in Visual Studio 2005 - Peter Provost has started a blog petition: "Unit Testing support should be included with all versions of Visual Studio 2005 and not just with Team System." This is getting a lot of traction in blogland, but it doesn't seem to me that anyone is asking the right question: what are you willing to give up to get this? Microsoft doesn't have unlimited resources, and they can't just shove more stuff in the sack without something spilling out the other end. The Team System people aren't even going to have all their bits in the next VS 2005 beta, which says to me that they're already overloaded. So: are you willing to have all of VS 2005 slip to get unit testing in the base packages? Are you willing to give up X other new sexy feature so resources can be reallocated? Do we even know enough about the architecture of Team System to know how much work would be involved in pulling out just the unit testing portion? Having unit testing everywhere is a nice thing, but I don't think a petition in advance of the facts is really all that productive.

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

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