Sasha Sydoruk

Just got back from the official launch event of Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008 and SQL Server 2008. It was quite amazing to see Steve Ballmer speak. Microsoft has some great plans for the launch products, and to be fair, they do look amazing.

VS 2008 is an amazing product for developing software. And especially now, with ReSharper 4.0 out, I can keep developing with passion. LINQ, lambda expression, faster VS, better JS debugging - all these together - AWESOME. Now we just need to wait for Silverlight 2 and MVC.

IIS 7 needs to be mentioned by itself. Hosting asp.net applications is going to so nice. I just can’t wait.

What else? I got to see Brad Adams speak. His presentation was nice, but a bit outdated. He mentioned asp.net ajax and ajax toolkit, which are great, but it is kind of old news now. I guess, Mix is where all the great stuff will come out. I mentioned my issues with Silverlight animations, but it didn’t seem like he knew of a fix.

Got to talk to some people from SQL Server team, and those guys were great! If you are their manager, they deserve a raise! SQL Server 2008 has some amazing features and I hope I will get to use it soon.

All in all, a great event, great swag and a lot of really great people.

2008 is going to be a wonderful year for developers!

Just found that out recently. I had to purchase a subscription for my wife and couldn’t help but notice how nice the site looked. The workflow is very well designed and is joy to use. Opened up the source and - “say hello to my little friend” - __VIEWSTATE.

Also found this white paper on surverymonkey.com from Microsoft - Customer Solution Case Study.

http://dotnetblogengine.net - is a great starter kit from Microsoft. It is a full featured blog engine written in ASP.NET.

It is very interesting to see how things are implemented. Xml based membership and role providers. Http modules for compression and url rewriting. Cool stuff.

Someone please defend Visual SourceSafe.

This is pretty funny. I have never really liked VSS myself. There is always something better out there. Some people are afraid of the cost, but with SVN the cost is not a problem. But SVN in general is quite foreign to a Windows developer, so that’s why some people go with Source Vault. I have used it a bit and I really like it. There is some cost to it but not too much.

But to answer the questions - “Let’s assume you’re in a situation where it would impractical or impossible to quickly switch to something better, what do you do to make using VSS more tolerable?” - I guess, I would make sure that there is only one person in charge of the merging. Use a lot of branching, stick with check in/out model, check your database for integrity from time to time, and no users spread around the world hitting the same database.

And of course - backup, backup and backup.

My blog is back online. The last WordPress updated somewhat destroyed my installation and it took me a while to make things right. Anyways, I am back now.

Stay tuned for more info.

I really want to like Silverlight, but it is really hard to do. The idea is great, but if you look at v1.0 it is… meh…

Tafiti, Popfly and Halo3 banner at microsoft.com are supposed to look nice, but the animation is so jerky, it makes me cry. It looks like a kid having epilepsy. It kills whatever interest I had in the product. Ironically, I spent 3 hours last night reading up on Silverlight and it feels like the time was wasted. Should have played WoW instead. Dino Esposito was absolutely right - Silverlight 1.0 was obsolete before it even came out of beta. Stillborn?

I really hope v1.1 will be absolutely awesome, but as of now - it is embarrassing.

Here is more - http://www.chausse.org/2007/08/tafiti-microsoft-bob-for-search/

Tafiti? who would ever use tafiti if there is Ms. Dewey?

Sad, but true.

• Reflector
• LLBLGen

Scott Hanselman - Sharpen the Saw for Developers

I, especially, like the part about creating a technical library at work and reserving some work time to read the books. I am a self-taught developer and without buying new books I wouldn’t get to where I am now. I think it is a really cheap way to become a better developer.

I am not so sure about attending conferences. They are usually interesting, but not very educational. Just my 2 cents.

• Ruby On Rails Migrations
• WCF
• Resharper 3.0
• Firebug
• Ruby On Rails Capistrano
• .NET DLR
• WPF
• Silverlight
• Warlock’s Pet at Level 20
• Murloc Suite