WiFi rocks. The Internet should be free everywhere. (Actually I think that they want to charge me but have a poor firewall.)

I demo Whitehorse at CTTP in the Netherlands tomorrow.

Microsoft Ship Dates Falling Like Dominoes-STOP

Yesterday Microsoft announced that Whidbey and Yukon will now have a ship date of the first half of next year. Whidbey’s official name will now be “Visual Studio 2005” and Yukon’s official name will be “SQL Server 2005”.

Predictably, blogland and the media made an event out of this. Why I ask?

So do we as developers care that the ship dates have moved? Not so much. We are still learning all the new stuff in the current versions of the products! Also anyone who has ever worked on a software project knows all well about management promising products before even talking to the development team about how long the development effort is going to take.

I very feel sorry for Microsoft, but whenever they announce a “slip” in a produce schedule, I get reminded of like the million times I had to announce a slip in a development effort to a customer of mine.

There are lots of things to beat up Microsoft about, but not this one. Let it go.

Let the Sun Shine (Part II)

A while ago I predicted that Sun Microsystems was headed to disaster when Moody’s lowered Sun’s credit rating to that of a Junk bond. Well Friday S&P did the same. Hopefully Sun will wake up and smell the coffee on Linux, when they have a real Linux strategy, they will no longer be doomed.

Brown Girl in the Ring

In 1985, two British climbers, Joe Simpson and Simon Yates became the first climbers to summit Siula Grande (appx 22,000’) in the Peruvian Andes. On the way down Joe took a bad fall and broke his leg very badly. Simon who should have left Joe attempted an amazing rescue effort. Simon tied two ropes together and lowered Joe 300 feet at a time. While on belay, Joe fell off a cliff and was hanging while Simon’s anchor was getting more and more unstable. At some point Simon made the very difficult (but correct) decision to cut the rope. Joe fell into a crevasse and was presumed dead.

Simon made the very difficult solo descent back to their base camp. Joe meanwhile with a broken leg and no food or water climbed out of the crevasse with his two ice tools (what most people would call an ice axe, but an ice axe is actually something different) and only 1 good leg. This was an amazing climb, probably the most amazing one in all of rock/ice climbing history.

The movie Touching the Void, documents this heroic and epic ascent, rescue effort and Joe’s climb out of the crevasse and days long crawl over the glacier back to base camp. Went to see it last night with Linda and John and lets just say we were all pretty moved. The strength and courage to stay alive and never give up was very motivating. It also reminded me of the lessons I learned on Everest, both in climbing and living your life. Somehow after seeing this movie the little things in life that bog your down don’t seem to matter all that much.

PS Siula Grande has yet to be summited again. Joe still climbs.

De SDGN heeft een Europese primeur!

Tijdens deze conferentie zal de eerste Europese demo van Whitehorse gegeven worden. Whitehorse is de codenaam voor een nieuwe tool van Microsoft die gereleased zal worden als onderdeel van de volgende versie van Visual Studio.NET. Whitehorse is het antwoord van Microsoft op de vraag naar producten voor Application Lifecycle Management. Whitehorse brengt UML-ontwerp, code en deployment bij elkaar binnen Visual Studio.NET.

(Learn Dutch, hee hee)

Remember when Steve B ran around stage and chanted this over and over. Microsoft is all about developers. DevDays in NJ is tomorrow and it is pretty much by developers for developers. Looking foward to showing Whitehorse and BizTalk again.

Last year, more than 70,000 developers across the world attended Tech-Ed (I spoke at 3 of them!) to and this year, between TechEd 2004 and DevDays 2004, another 100,000 developers will gather together to learn the ins and outs of Visual Studio. Simply amazing! Not even counting the MDC in Egypt, Pakistan Dev Conference and NDC in Morocco!

See you a future developer event.

I’m an IntelliSense Junkie

At least according to my quote in InfoWorld, I was interviewed as part of an article on the .NET Report Card (view it here in PDF.)

So after 2 years (.NET shipped just over 2 years ago), where does .NET stand? According to InfoWorld, we are looking at about a B to B+ grade overall (see the report for the details). I speak at lots of conferences and user groups and only talk about .NET and the developers I meet around the world only want to talk .NET and seem to love it and dig in deep. I am also the CTO of a financial services company, where I use .NET every day. I have forgotten what Visual Studio 6.0 even looks like and don’t have it installed on any machine. Am I normal?

Yukon Lays Down the Security Gauntlet

Microsoft is taking its “Secure by Default” motto very seriously in the next version of SQL Server code named Yukon. SQL Server PM Tom Rizzo said recently while it is too early to tell, Yukon will ship with a lot of features off by default and secure by default.

Here is my advice to the team, after setup, FORCE the installation to not work until you change the SA password.

Yet More Buzz Around Whitehorse

A few RDs are quoted here in yet another article on Whitehorse. There is a clear momentum around Whitehorse.

Uber RD Tim Huckaby said that he expects software developers and architects will be "overjoyed" when they get their hands on Whitehorse.

Semi cool RD Scott Hanselman said: Whitehorse should also help developers create software more quickly,  The combination of the tool's Web services assembly approach and the prewritten chunks of code that Microsoft provides "gives me bigger and bigger Lego blocks than I've ever had to play with before," Hanselman said.

As he noted in my comments the other day, Keith Short (the Whitehorse Architect) just started a Blog as well: http://blogs.msdn.com/keith_short.