Stephen Forte's WebBlog

Corporate Terrorism

Tue, 16 Mar 2004 14:44:58 GMT

Corporate Terrorism

Nobody likes terrorists, something that I was unfortunately reminded of during my time here in Europe . Basically violence is not the answer to getting your cause heard.

I made the same claim against Environmental Terrorism. Most people would consider themselves an “environmentalist” (as I do) but prefer to protect the environment by recycling and giving money to organizations like the World Wildlife Fund. I do hate when Greenpeace or some other more radical group blows up a McDonalds or performs some other act of Environmental Terrorism.

Last month Microsoft was the victim of Corporate Terrorism plain and simple. Its source code was leaked in the Internet. I have no proof, but I bet it was done by people trying to prove a point that Open Source is “better” than closed source. These are nothing more than Corporate Terrorists, trying to hold a company hostage or bring it down.

I do not condemn the Open Source movement (doing so would force me to condemn many people important to me, including my roommate) just like I don’t condemn all Environmentalists when there is environmental terrorism (and I am not going to touch the hot potato of Islamic terrorism in this entry, stay tuned for my thoughts on Madrid in a later piece). But this clearly is a gross violation of IP and just plain old wrong. Whoever did this can you look at yourself in the mirror anymore? Who do you see back?

(This report was done via the free Internet in Paris , yes the Internet should be free everywhere!)

Well, Duh.

Tue, 16 Mar 2004 01:20:06 GMT

Well, Duh.

eWeek ran an article on Friday saying how users are willing to wait for Yukon and Whidbey. Well duh.

I blogged on this last week and someone disagreed with me, but I stick by my original statements. Think of it this way, Whidbey is due in early 2005 (1^st half so let’s estimate April/May). Visual Studio 2003 shipped in April 2003, that is ONLY 2 YEARS between cycles. Part of me wants them to push it back again. I think it is a good thing that product cycles are getting longer. Software is more complex and needs the time for feedback and QA.

I showed off Whitehorse today in the Netherlands at CTTP. Whitehorse ’s European debut. Developers were super excited but did not care that it was a year away, they wanted it done right. I had to demo Whitehorse today from an AVI I took of the screen shots on my computer back at the office, I could not get the Virtual Image to install without issue on my laptop, more a problem with my laptop than the image. (I hate DELL ). So the Dutch were treated to the same demos I did at DevDays just without any bugs, errors, crashes, etc!

So my blog is apparently very well read in the Netherlands , it was quoted in a Dutch paper last week.

There was a moment of science today at noon all across Europe for the victims of the Madrid bombings on Thursday.

Free Internet at Charles De Gaulle Airport

Sun, 14 Mar 2004 21:00:37 GMT

Free Internet at Charles De Gaulle Airport

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

Thu, 11 Mar 2004 21:48:52 GMT

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)

Mon, 08 Mar 2004 22:16:28 GMT

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

Sun, 07 Mar 2004 02:11:00 GMT

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!

Fri, 05 Mar 2004 02:50:29 GMT

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)

Developers, Developers, Developers

Wed, 03 Mar 2004 21:31:20 GMT

Developers, Developers, Developers

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

Tue, 02 Mar 2004 00:16:12 GMT

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

Fri, 27 Feb 2004 21:53:53 GMT

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.