A random collection of thoughts from an easily bored developer
As I’ve previously mentioned, as of October 1st 2008 MSDN subscribers who have previously only had access to Visual Studio Team System Development Edition can now also use Database Edition. The reasoning behind this move has now been made clear thanks to the January MSDN Subscription Newsletter: In the next release of Visual Studio Team [...]
We’ve got a stock standard Windows 2008 virtual hard drive image at work that I wanted to make some additions to and generally polish up into a decent developer image. The install media was the “Windows Server 2008 Datacenter, Enterprise and Standard (x86) – DVD (English)” ISO sourced from MSDN. I noticed that the image [...]
Ferreting around in a spare room/cupboard/garage/other junk storage area can sometimes yield a wonderful surprise. I recently re-discovered an old, broken guitar sitting in our spare bathroom (which has been totally stripped awaiting renovation for.. oh, about 2 years now, and is now serving as an extra large cupboard. But that’s another story); an Epiphone [...]
Generic error messages are high on my list of pet peeves. Being told that “an error occurred” may be something that you can pass off in a line of business application, especially if the actual error message gets emailed to the help desk or something similar, but it is totally unacceptable in a product targeted [...]
The idea of trust within a software development team is an interesting one. Jeff Atwood argues that a lack of trust between management and the development team can lead to “micromanagement zombies” who mindlessly follow anything management tells them without contributing creatively. I believe that the issue is much more complex than this, as demonstrated [...]
I’ve never been a fan of “bling”. I don’t wear watches, necklaces, rings, earrings or anything of that sort. If my shirt requires cuff links then I’ll usually wear the standard “monkeys fist” style silk knot cuff links that come with some French cuff shirts. Saying all that, I love these cufflinks. They were a [...]