November 2005 Entries

Certainly this isn't the full encapsulation of the economics of software development, but it certainly is the portion that we developers are most likely to see clearly.  I know that I was in the "bug free product" mindset when I first start developing.  Unfortunately I didn't have any people around me who could clearly explain the fact that some bugs shouldn't be dignified by being fixed.  Yah it's nice to be able to claim that you produce bug free software, but if you walk around stating this fact with a straight face you most certainly are living in Wonderland.  This comment by Jonathon Gibb states it at the root.  When...

K. Scott Allen's design pattern explaination for bar rooms.

Today I spent the day at the Edmonton Launch event.  The sessions were fairly interesting, the swag was great and the check-in and departure processes were horrific.  Pictures courtesy of Sasha here. The day was split into two sessions.  The first, and least attended, was the TechNet session on SQL Server 2k5 and BizTalk 2k6.  It was interesting to see some of the stuff in the demos, but huge things (like Database Mirroring and Database Snapshots) that I thought pertained to the TechNet side were not even mentioned.  There was however a good primer on Analysis Services that got me thinking about possible solutions. The swag was just as expected. ...

It's picnic time in the forest folks and all the little ants are going to be showing up to take a piece of it away.  Last night I was out at the MS/.Net User Group VIP event (I felt so VIPish).  It was held at Cargo and James on Whyte.  They were good enough to reserve a small section for us and MS was good enough to buy a couple of rounds of tea.  According to Sasha (aren't we a dapper group), Edmonton was the first show to sell out, so we're off this morning to get a good and early start to the proceedings.  I'm pretty stoked to...

Don't you just hate it when you go to tie your shoes and you're greeted with a pleasant snap followed by a lessening of resistance in one arm (two if it is going to be an excessively crappy day)?  This morning I had this happen on my one pair of work shoes (well I have workboots, but they're covered in shit from the dog team I'm training to take me to work this winter).  Of course, these types of shoes provide you with only the least amount of lace possible, but just enough that they're still capable of being tied.  Now I have to find a place that...

For the last few weeks I've been busier than all get out at work and thus haven't been posting much.  We've been working to push the first release of our software to the client's production environment.  We finally got ourselves to that point on Friday, but it didn't happen without some hiccups, late nights and weekends.  To top it all off I've been working on some code at home. I'm thinking that we're going to be a little slower over the next few weeks so hopefully I'll have the energy to post about some the technical things that I've been working on.  These are going to focus on VS and...