Long ago I blogged about a motto of ours: Fail Fast. Some people replied with comments like "why fail at all?" but that misses the point. Mottos are short and pithy; a more accurate version of the motto would be "if you're going to fail at all, get it over with at the beginning." Here's another take on the concept ... how a week's stall while a decision gets made can cost a company thousands of dollars in hard costs. It's my experience it costs far more in reduced morale and productivity over time.

Kate

Are you going to Mix? Still trying to decide? Maybe The Signal can help you decide ... or get you warmed up if you're already committed to attending.

Kate

Soma blogged this before Tech Ed Developers and I actually snagged a few bullet points to add to my slides, but I never posted a pointer to the original. It's nice to see some firm numbers and as always nice to see "higher ups" remembering C++.

Kate

So, you're the proud owner of a ton of Visual Studio 2005 projects. And you've heard that converting them to 2008 projects is pretty much a flawlessly easy thing to do ... just open the project, let the conversion wizard run, and save it. Done! Except that if you have a hundred projects, that would be a crummy way to spend your time. Who has a hundred projects? Well a book might, or a course, or a presenter with tons of demos kicking around (I resemble that remark), or a development team with a lot on the go, I suppose.

Anyway, even if you only have dozens, wouldn't you like to be able to deal with them practically instantly instead of opening each in VS, watching the wizard do stuff, clicking Next and Finish on relatively pointless dialogs that essentially mean Are You Sitting Comfortably? No problem. John Robbins has a cool tip for you, but it's so short I can include it here in its entirety.

Open a Visual Studio Command prompt. CD your way to the folder with your project in it. Issue this command, subbing in your own sln file name:

devenv /upgrade MySoln.sln

Move on to the next folder. That's gotta be faster than watching wizards work! Remember, typing is a valuable skill even for the developers of today.

Kate

As I've mentioned before, I don't generally consider snow in December to be newsworthy around these parts. It's normal and in fact, it's nice. But we're in the midst of a storm that's getting a lot of attention. One headline told us "You'll be Telling Your Grandchildren About This Storm" which seemed a little over the top. But this morning's radar capture tells me they weren't kidding:

This makes the capture from three years ago seem positively anemic. Back then I said I'd never seen the whole circle filled in, nor had I seen orange for snow... this one has red! OK, it's not near us, but it's still on the screen.

Since I don't live under a rock, I knew this was coming. I did my errands Saturday and today we're tucked up safe and warm with only housework and coding to do

Kate

I can't remember where I heard about this now... I had thought it was Steve Clayton but I just searched without success. So, unattributed then, here is a cool thing:

Thats's from http://www.google.com/trends?q=c%2B%2B%2C+c%23&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0

The top pair of lines is searches (blue C++, red C#) and the bottom is news references. You can run this on a single thing to track it over time or on a set of things to compare them, whatever works for you. Here's what you might demonstrate with a single term:

http://www.google.com/trends?q=katrina&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0

I bet you those blipups are anniversary articles. Anyway, imagine what you can do with this! Have fun!

Kate

I've mentioned before that sometimes when I search for information about topics that matter to me, the search results frustratingly include mostly things that I wrote. That's annoying when you're trying to learn more! But from time to time that same search turns up things I've forgotten, like this interview from over four years ago with Stephen Ibaraki. He's a good interviewer and it's interesting what the interview covers. People ask me all the time "how can I be a speaker too?" or "what does a Regional Director do, anyway?" There are some answers to those, and some tips about writing, interop, porting a project over to .NET, running small business, and more too. It's pretty cool!

Kate

In Barcelona I was lucky enough to meet Lynn Langit who told me about a number of important initiatives she's working on. I mean how can you resist "we're saving lives with Visual Studio Team Systems" as an elevator pitch? She means it, too. Lynn also does geekSpeak webcasts - no slides, no detailed agenda, just show the people something, wait for a question, show them the answer to the question, repeat for an hour. It sounds like terrific fun and I watched a few to make sure it would be, then I said yes, I would do one.

MSDN Webcast: MSDN geekSpeak: The Windows Vista Bridge for .NET Programmers (Level 300) 

Event ID: 1032362711

Register now! Ask questions in advance on the geekSpeak blog!

Kate