grack.com

Sounds like there’s a bit of a negative vibe going around the blogosphere concerning the impending release of a buggy VS.NET 2005. All things considered, this doesn’t surprise me much. VS.NET 2003 shipped with so many bugs that were never fixed. Heck, there wasn’t even a service pack!

I don’t understand why they keep shipping below-par releases of their IDE. I feel as if enterprise developers are left out to dry to better serve Microsoft MVPs doing inane web services demos. None of those MVPs ever demoed a solution with more than 90 projects. I’d wager that noone within Microsoft ever even tried it, considering how badly it works.

My suggestion: don’t ship until you’ve got all the bugs out. It’s such a no-brainer that I can’t believe bloggers need to bring it up.

From the first posts I made to this blog in 2003, I’ve had a couple of blogging goals in mind. I want to reiterate them to keep myself on track:

1. Post original ideas. I’d like to keep the content here fresh. There’s no use in repeating what people have said already. Writing technical articles (like my CVS-over-ssh and various other tutorials) are a good way of keeping this thing interesting.
2. Be more than a link blog. I hate link blogs – I would rather subscribe to digg or Slashdot if I want a steady stream of links. Links are okay if you’re going to make an honest attempt at discussing the content, but mindless links should be kept to a minimum.
3. Keep the conversation going. There’s a lot of other bloggers out there with fresh ideas and interesting perspectives. Blogging is a good way of getting into the conversation. It’s rewarding to post responses to some of the stuff that the rest of the world is thinking about.
4. Post often, even if it’s not much. No use keeping a blog if you’re not going to update it, no?

It’s been 40+ days since I switch off Sharpreader to the Sage extension for Firefox. My blog-reading habits have changed as a result of the switch as well.

One of the big changes is that I’ve found myself reading only the latest few articles per blog, rather than attempting to read all the new articles like I did with Sharpreader.

Sage lacks an auto-refresh feature, but because of this I’m feeling less pressured by my newsreader to catch up constantly. I refresh only once or twice a day now, down from the “every four hours” of Sharpreader.

Overall I’m impressed. The only features I’d like to add would be:

1. auto-marking of articles of read after I’ve switched to another feed,
2. ability to filter out “seen” articles so that I don’t have them showing up in the feed window, and
3. changing the click action to start loading the feed in the current tab right away, rather than waiting until the feed has loaded and opening in whatever tag is now current.

The great thing about Sage is the customizable style sheets. Check out the Sage stylesheet selector for some example feed styles. Note: I’m currently using the one named “hicks” off that page.

For those of you reading via the website rather than RSS, please excuse the CSS changes that have been happening over the last couple of hours.

I decided it was time for another CSS tweak, but it should be done now. I haven’t tested it on IE yet, but I’m crossing my fingers that it still works!

Update: Looks like everything degrades well in IE (phew).

I’ve decided it’s time to cut some of the so-called A-list bloggers from my daily reading list. The two that aren’t going to make the cut are Dave Winer and Robert Scoble.

Dave’s been on the chopping block for a while – the entries are pretty much just “OPML this” and “OPML that”. While I appreciate his evangelization efforts for RSS, OPML just doesn’t interest me in any way whatsoever.

Robert was interesting for a couple of days last week when he stopped his Google/Yahoo/Microsoft posts entirely (the so-called “non-GYM series”), but it didn’t last forever and now he’s back to spinning his wheels. At least he hasn’t mentioned the tablet PC for a bit. I just can’t bear to hear him talk about Windows Live for the next year until the next vaporware hype-fest starts.

Two down for now but I can probably get rid of a couple more.