The World According to Marc

Keith Pleas taught me a few things when he have a talk on Localization at the Boston .NET User's Group last night. But the most important one was this: I will never do localization! One of the most important things in being a developer is knowing you limitations, and this folks is one of mine. I would quite simply hang myself within hours of starting a localization project.

One a side note, Jeff's on .NET was very interesting. He insight into ngen.exe answered a lot of lingering question I've had about the utility. If you have a chance to see him speak, do so. He is one of the few speakers that can speak geek without making you feel like you just walked into a chess club from hell. Very funny, and very informative.

And sorry Jeff, I still agree with Chris Sells. Unseal the darn framework. Interfaces would be an improvement, but I would rather no have to rewrite the class completely just so I can make a minor improvement.

And just when I thought everything was going good, a virtual hammer falls on my knee. Just a minute ago, I heard that Russ Fustino is leaving New England for Florida!

For those of you not in New England, Russ is a legend around here. For the last 5 years he has run the most entertaining technology seminars I've ever had the please of attending. 

Thanks for the fun Russ.

Source Code Control is an absolute passion of mine. I get physically ill at the mere though of developing software without it. I could go on for hours about how important it is to understand and use source control, but I'll save you the pain of reading it. I'll just say this; If you don't use it, go pound sand. How is that?

One of my all time favorite source control systems is CVS (StarBase gets top honors, but at $6,000,000,000 per seat they don't get my business). The great thing about CVS is that it is very flexible and completely free. Don't get me wrong, there are defiantly issues with it, but most of them can be ignored. Especially in the face of it being "free".

There is however one major issue that has prevented me from using CVS in the last few years, no IDE integration with Visual Studio. There were some tools out there like JalindiIgloo, but they just didn't cut it (really, it flat out doesn't work...).

I could have just used an external IDE to manage it like WinCvs or TortoiseCVS. But WinCvs offends my UI sensibilities. It deserves a Life Time Achievement award from the UI Hall Of Shame. And while I do like TortoiseCVS, it just doesn't feel comfortable to manage source code from within the Explorer. To CVS wasn't much of an option for a long time.

Then I found the "CVS SCC Proxy" plug-in from PushOK Software. The basic concept is that the PushOK Proxy 100% mimics Visual Source Safe. This means that you get all of the integration benefits of Visual Source Safe with solid support of CVS behind it. Oh, and it is Free as well. 

I cannot over exaggerate how cool this little tool is. And I cannot tell you how happy I am to finally be able to use CVS with Visual Studio and not have to handle anything outside the IDE . The best part is that I can now intergrate my FogBugs database with my source control.

I've tested this product with Visual Studio 2002, Visual Studio 2003, Visual Basic 6.0, and Visual C++ 6.0. I found no problems using the tool this any of them.

Now if I could only find an ASP.NET browser for the CVS repository....

Thanks to a great idea for skinning (and skin) from Jesse and an even better idea of borrowing it from Roy, I now have a nice new skin for my site. Woot!

This question was posed to me at a development meeting and I simply could not think of an answer.

If a user has SQL Server 2000 installed and then installs an instance of MSDE 2000, do the limits of MSDE remain? In other words, will that MSDE instance be limited to 5 batch jobs and have the same performance degradation that MSDE alone would have?

I had the pleasure of interviewing a recent college graduate the other day. While he was one of the smartest kids I've met in some time, I was utterly shocked at how many holes where in his formal education. What is even more disheartening is that I have also learned that his experience is very much the norm.

What struck me the most was how anti-Microsoft he was (the entire college world for the matter). Is every professor looking to turn out a legion of Microsoft haters to go fight to "good fight"? With 90+% of the world running Windows, this is quite a disservice to their students. The fact is, there are not a lot of Linux development positions out there for these kids. And Open Source doesn't put much food on the table. 

Scary....

DataGirl got me thinking....

Most every blog includes a comments section. The thing is, it is almost never used (with the exception of Chris Sells' blog that is). I think this has a lot to do with the format. It is more of a "bathroom-wall" approach than a discussion forum.

Maybe we should borrow a concept from the blog's older cousin, the Rant Site, and use actual forums instead (each post is then linked to a discussion thread)? They do lend themselves to more of a community than the standard comment system we use today.

Borland just released the Optimizeit Profiler for .NET. I had the opportunity to see this little guy at the Windows/VS Studio 2003 Launch Event in Boston the other day. It was pretty impressive and relatively easy to configure.

As with everything Borland, the $699 price tag is a bit much. I’ve not used many profiling tools in the past so maybe it is competitive. But for someone like me who doesn’t have a desperate need, just a strong desire, it is more than I’m willing to toss into the budget.