Microsoft® VSTS (Visual Studio Team System) is a really cool idea.  It combines a lot of common concerns for a lot of developers, offering a one-stop shopping experience that's really appealing. 

It's comforting for most people to be able to manage their version control from the same interface in which they are making the changes necessitating the control of versions.

It's useful to be able to see what other members of one's team are up to, and tie issues to actual change sets in code (and be able to report on it all).

It's empowering to be able to apply custom check-in constraints to force comments on code changes (or integrate one's own time tracking, as we have done where I work).

But I'm not writing to discuss all these points.  The points above are well-documented by Microsoft® and require no further lobbying from the likes of me.  I like VSTS, to be sure, but there are some shortcomings, in my opinion.

Last Friday was going to be a big day for my team.  We were about to implement a code branching strategy for our version control system, which was needed, but had been badly applied in the past and which was the cause of a certain amount of angst among the senior development staff.  I was in charge of implementing the changes, which included adding a new layer to our folder hierarchy and moving all active development into that folder.  In my experience with version control systems, it is usually an exceptionally bad idea to change the folder structure while there are pending changes in the system, so I sent a preparatory email to the affected developers (a relatively small, manageable number of people) to please resolve their pending changes before I began the update.More...

Everyone's been to the fair, right? The state fair? The county fair? A travelling carnival? Chuck E. Cheese's? If so, you've more than likely seen (if not played) some variant of the popular game colloquially known to me as "Whack-a-Mole" or by its more obscure moniker "Mole Whack-Em".

For those who haven't enjoyed this passtime, the rules are simple: artificial mole-shaped puppets pop randomly out of roughly mole-sized holes cut into a game board. The player, holding a mallet, tries to strike (or "whack") the artificial moles as quickly as possible since their appearance is timed and, if left unwhacked, they will disappear into the dark belly of the game board whence they came.

A simple game concept, and great fun for all.

Now, consider a version of "Whack-a-Mole" in which the mole-shaped puppets pop up, but do not recede if they are not struck.
Additionally, consider that our hypothetical version of this game has an infinitely large (or at least some very large) domain of potential mole-shaped puppets.
Finally, assume that the game board is free to grow as you play, allowing for an indefinite number of visible mole-shaped puppets at any given time, all waiting for you to clobber them with your mallet. More...

Dismayed at low recruiting numbers in the Army and Marine Corps, U.S. officials have decided the best way to cope is to simply change their criteria for entry into those armed forces to allow more convicts into service.

I found this partial breakdown of the waiver grantees interesting: More...

...and no, I'm not referring to the recent changes in U.S. military recruiting thresholds (more on that later).

I am, of course, referring to Warner Bros. studio's recent vague threats against Helmer John Buechler when he mentioned a remake to his movie "Troll".

You remember "Troll", don't you?  It's that honeysuckle 80's blend of fantasy and excrement featuring a boy, his possessed sister, a geriatric sorceress, her pet mushroom and (spoiler alert) a nasty troll with extremely limited facial expressions and no intelligible dialog.  Oh, and Julia Louis-Dreyfus as the hot single babe who is unwittingly drawn into the troll's hellish fantasy realm, where she scampers, semi-nude, as a wood nymph.

The catch? Simple.  The lead character (the boy, not the troll) is named Harry Potter, and the film was developed about ten years before JK Rowling's famous boy wizard hit bookstores. 

Avada kedavra, beeyach!

It might be said that lately I have been ill.

I've had (as Christopher Walken put in during his infamous Blue Oyster Cult skit on SNL) a "fever". 

Unlike Mr. Walken's compulsion for cowbell, however, my penchant has been for pasta.  I should point out, though, that cowbell is a close second, even so many years past BOC's glory days.

It all started a little more than a week ago while I was watching reruns of Molto Mario, Mario Batali's short-lived cooking show for the Food Network, recently revived in syndication by the Fine Living channel. 

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The title comes from a response email I received from a friend of mine who is beginning the search for a new job.  His company - one I previously worked for, as well, and where I still have some friends - has systematically removed the few features that once made them attractive enough to continue drawing a pay check, to name a few:

1. Free drinks and regular "ice cream socials" during non-payroll weeks
2. A sane telecommuting policy
3. Annual salary increases that at least kept pace with increases in the cost of living
4. Respectable middle management

I make no apologies if any of the items above seem petty.  The simple fact is, they were all provided at some point; they all made employment at said company more attractive - either through some kind of social interaction, job satisfaction or by simply compensating on pace with the current economy, and they have all been removed (or, in the case of item 4, fled the company) over a period of time for no stated reason: therefore they are perceived as losses to the quality of the work environment by its employees.  I've seen this pattern repeated with at least three companies in sequence in the Austin area alone. More...

After lots of procrastination, I finally decided I was being left behind by the .Net community and started researching LINQ (Language INtegrated Query) and its underlying technologies - anonymous methods, anonymous types, lambda expressions (predicates and assignments), and extender methods etc. Ironically, I purchased an APress’ Pro LINQ exactly one day before finding out that Microsoft had made Introduction to Microsoft LINQ freely available (or nearly so - you need a Passport account, and have to aquiesce to a short personal info questionnaire). I don’t feel like my APress dollars were wasted, however. Their treatment of the different classes of LINQ (-to Objects, -to ADO.Net, -to XML, etc.) appears to be fairly exhaustive, where the ‘Intro’ volume looks like it lays the groundwork for the technology. One of the items that caught my eye immediately was the concept of extender methods, which allow developers to change the behavior of existing types - even (or perhaps particularly) sealed ones. Now, that’s an excellent idea.  More...