Jerry Dennany's Occasional Clue

I work for a pretty cool company, on a pretty nifty product team.  When ASP.NET  first came out, the team took part of our application and web-enabled it, standardizing on the VB.NET language.  It made sense at the time, as much of our previous ASP work was VB based.  However, most of our application is written on C++, and the transition to C# from C++ is a much easier transition than from VB.NET.  So, despite our present VB.NET code base, the team is standardizing on the C# language.

My rant for  today:

Aaron Stebner has an interesting article on MSI Resiliency, but before we get all excited about self-repairing applications, let's recognize something.  Not even Microsoft gets this one correct, so how can we expect customers and ISVs to become dependent on this feature?

A little bit ago, someone asked for the best method to back up a windows cluster.  Instead of trying to cover all the bases myself, I'll point to this technet article:

 This is certainly the blog site to go to for Microsoft centric conversation - I'm deluged with very interesting articles on everything from “Source Safe Power Toys” to the interesting concept of UI Mappers (I'm not certain that I fully get the concept, but I am always a bit slower on the uptake than Paul).

I'm getting a bit tired of people recommending McConnell's Code Complete, 2nd Edition.  The book isn't even released yet!  No one that I know has read it, so why is everyone recommending it?  I recently read one post that went so far as to claim that it should be on every developers bookshelf.  Now that would be a neat trick!

Know someone who's interested in programming, but doesn't want to purchase Visual Studio?  I'd suggest sending them over to Microsoft's "VB at the Movies," where they can get a free copy of Visual Basic .NET 2003 Standard Edition after viewing and reviewing a few clips from the website.
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We've all been exposed to Design Patterns, and their indelible impressions are apparent in any well designed software.