Greetings, all!  My apologies again for doing such a bad job of keeping you up to date.  I have been absorbed with my duties as interim development manager for our team, and have not had much time to delve into the various technical things going on in the areas I’m still nominally dev lead for.  (Fortunately, I have great sub-leads...

Hi all -   So, as I mentioned in an earlier blog entry, Alex Kipman & Rajeev Goel are going to do a PDC presentation on MSBuild (the new build engine we’re including with Whidbey).  If you’re going to the PDC, be sure to check it out.  It’s Monday, Oct. 27th from 4:45-6pm in one of the big rooms.  I’ve seen one of the early...

Greetings all –   My apologies for being a bit out of touch for the last few weeks.  There have been several “fires” burning that I’ve had to deal with, plus a short vacation for my 10-year college reunion a couple weeks ago.  And now, my manager has been promoted to a different position inside MSFT and I’ve been asked to be interim...

So, I saw the movie Whale Rider this weekend, and I have to say it's one of the best movies I've seen in a long time.  Reading a synopsis of the film you wouldn't think much of it, but it really grabs you.  The girl who plays the lead role does an amazing job, and the rest of the cast is superb as well.  If you get a chance to see...

Hi all -   More stuff has come online.  See here for a little blurb about MSBuild, which is what we're calling our cool new build engine that will ship along with Whidbey. -Chris

Greetings, all!   Microsoft has announced the broad outline of the material to be presented at the PDC 2003.  See here for the list of tracks & presentations.   Under the “Languages and Tools” section you’ll see a cryptic reference to “a new unified build system”.  This is one of the really cool things we’re working on for...

Greetings all!  Today something happened which got me thinking about one of the nastiest problems in software development: feature creep.  This is when the feature set of a product morphs and grows to the point where it’s a significantly different product than when it began.   I’m reminded of an experience a few months ago when I...

Greetings, all!  It looks like the Europeans came to their senses and rejected American-style software patents.  See here for a ZDNet article on this.  There was a recent article in the Economist discussing the EU’s consideration of software patents, which got to the point much better than other articles I’ve read.   And before...

Greetings, all!  In my entry about devenv /build, a reader named Toby mentions the pain of maintaining multiple configurations when you have a lot of them that are identical except for one flag.  He says:   In my work, I'll deal with several types of configurations: release, debug, profile build, unicode/mbcs, managed/unmanaged,...

Software is such an interesting field.  We can’t figure out whether it’s a craft or an engineering discipline.  Personally, I think it should be an engineering discipline, but it’s one that’s fundamentally different from physical engineering like building a bridge or skyscraper.   Why should software be any different?  After...

Greetings, dear readers!  Today I want to talk about using devenv.exe to build a solution or project from the command line (as opposed to interactively inside the IDE).  For example, you can say “devenv /build debug myapp.sln” to do a debug build of myapp.sln.  Now, I have to admit that if there was one feature I could deny any...

Greetings, dear readers!  Today I want to talk about solution configurations and project configurations.  These are important concepts that are essential to understand if you’re trying to do complex coordination of builds using VS, esp. if you're using the DTE or devenv /build at the command line.  However, this is a tricky subject...

Greetings, all!  In my recent software process readings, I came upon a great book.  It all started when I was doing some searching on the web and I stumbled upon this article in SD magazine.  It discusses how the Japanese used the concept of continuous process improvement to pass by the USA in the manufacture of many products in the...

So, the July stats for the GotDotNet blog pages came out, and I actually showed up with a statistically significant number of hits!  I started my blog in late June, and I had so few hits in June that I didn't even show up in the June report (kind of demoralizing).  But for July I got over a thousand separate visits at my main page (and...

Greetings dear readers -   I have been devoting some time to matters of how to better manage a software project, and have opened up a new category on my blog: "SD methodologies & processes".  Hopefully you will find it useful.   I have a terrible confession to make, my friends.  There are still a few people at Microsoft who...