Wednesday, June 20, 2007

Morning Coffee 92

• Brad Wilson blogs about SvnBridge, a tool that lets you use Subversion clients like TortoiseSVN to talk to Team Foundation Server. While I think that's cool, I wonder is anyone interested in subversion clients other than TortoiseSVN? For example, will people choose AnkhSVN instead of the Team Explorer Client?
• Speaking of TortoiseSVN, I wonder if those guys are interested in building a TortoiseTFS project? I did find two other TFS shell extensions projects: Dubbelbock TFS and Turtle, though neither appears as full featured as Tortoise.
• Scott Guthrie details VS08's multi-targeting support. Of course, the three versions of the .NET Framework VS08 can target all use the same underlying runtime, which probably made it easier to build.
• Michael Platt refactors Don Box's original tenets of service orientation so he can include some information about how these services get built.
• Scott Hanselman tackles the tricky question of assembly granularity.
• PowerShell Analyzer is now available for purchase. Among other things your $59 gets you, besides a 50% savings, is "Feature request priority". That's pretty cool. I wonder how many other micro-ISV's take the approach of "pay me now and you get to help me pick some of the new features."
• Brandon LeBlanc writes about dual monitor support in Vista. I'm loving the dual monitor support, though I have a somewhat strange setup. I keep my primary monitor rotated in portrait mode, which is great for reading and writing. I typically use my second monitor for blogs and mail. I even wrote a custom multi-mon wallpaper utility so I could easily generate new wallpapers for my non-standard monitor layout, including bitmap rotate support. If there's interest, I can post it. (via Sam Gentile)
• Nick Malik continues to write about Mort, with the usual response from the usual folks. I liked his point that "You cannot fight economics with education", but otherwise I'm staying out of this discussion.
• In the same vein, Martin Fowler writes about Technical Debt. I completely agree with his hypothesis that short changing design may save time in the short term but will cost much more in the long term. However, the problem is that the people who are making the tradeoff - i.e. the people paying for the project NOT the people building the project - either don't understand the tradeoff or are more than happy to sacrifice the long term cost for the short term gain. How are most projects measured? Being on time and on budget with the planned set of features. Very few projects - and none that I've ever seen - are goaled on long term maintainability. Until you can change that, this issue will continue to linger.