Today, Scoble gave me a field promotion. After I publicly gave him a hard time for it, I got thinking about what a strange thing it is to be a program manager, and that some people might be interested in what we really do. I'm therefore going to talk about what I do from time to time...

Back in March, I wrote a column entitled "Unit Testing and Test-First Development". I've been playing around with unit testing a bit more since then, and have a few tentative conclusions. Unit testing is, overall, a "Good Thing" Unit...

Every week the Visual C# PM team spends a few minutes watching Red vs. Blue, a serial told using the characters in Halo on the XBox. Funny even if you don't play Halo, very funny if you do. If you like this, pony up the $10 or $20 to help defray the costs, and get the hi-res versions...

Little known fact of the day... Noted Physicist Stephen Hawking also has a career as a dope MC

Eric Sink relates to the "Software Legends" marketing campaign by putting up his own site...

My most recent C# column has gone live on MSDN. In it, I talk about what I learned in trying to build a remote control application that runs on the PocketPC using the compact framework. http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dncscol/html/csharp07172003.asp...

This came to me from one of the members of the VB team.

I was listening to something a day or so ago, and I came across one of my favorite: Supreme executive power derives from a mandate of the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony. Who said this, and who did he say it to? If you don't know the answer, then I despair...

In It's Time for Language Divergence, Patrick Meader discusses divergence between C# and VB programmers. I agree that VB and C# users have differences between them, but I think that saying that the languages should diverge is a strange position. It's not about divergence, it's about...

I had an interesting discussion a day or so ago on when you should implement IDisposable on a class. Like many things, it's more complicated when you dig a little. There are three scenarios that are interesting: 1) A class that wraps an unmanaged resource 2) A class that has fields that...

  I've been reading GapingVoid for a few months now. Hugh has some very interesting insights, and draws great cartoons, though some of them are not safe for work. Yesterday, he wrote a post titled Make your customers the marketing department, with the cartoon that I've included above. The post has some good points in it, but I'm more...

I've been riding a lot of hills recently, getting ready for the 7 Hills of Kirkland on Memorial Day, and I'm getting more used to climbing and less scared of the steeper hills. But I've found that there is a dearth of information about the various hills that I ride on. The best source that I've found is the "Larry Kemp climb spreadsheet", which...

Rory posted an interesting counterpoint to my review. Rory has some good points - I agree that you can't expect a movie to be totally faithful to a book, and I have noticed that there is a distinct correlation between how well somebody liked the book (and, perhaps, how familiar they were with the book), and how disappointed they were with the...

Yesterday, I managed to find the original Hitchhiker's radio series in an archive from KCRW, an NPR station station in Santa Barbara. The series consists of 12 half-hour segments, with the full twelve segments covering the the first three books of the trilogy (roughly). It's definitely worth a listen, and it's interesting how Adams evolved and...

Rusty, the C# QA Manager, writes about the fate of bugs reported through MSDN feedback. Please let him know what you think of the process.