I can use Microsoft Surface but I can not nest directories as deep as I want

Microsoft Research is surprising us nearly every month. Just to name a few of their great products: PhotoSynth and Microsoft Surface. But you know what every day I hit the #$%@ limitation on the length of the path. 260 characters and that's all I can get in the .NET framework. Guys, can we back up a bit and solve the basic problems?
Resharper - click on the picture to see the details:

MsBuild - click on the picture to see the details:

Bunch of Scotts talking about the new Microsoft MVC framework

Scott Hanselman recorded two sessions about the new Microsoft MVC framework.  Both of them look interesting though you need to take into account that they are showing really rough bits. If you just like me don't want to watch them in a browser you can download them directly to your local disk:

1. Scott Gu - MVC
2. Scott Hanselman - MVC + DLR

Microsoft .NET framework goes open source - kind of :)

Scott Guthrie doesn't stop surprising me. Nearly every month he publishes something that makes me think that Microsoft is not that bad at all :). Today topic is the .NET source code. One could say that Reflector provides that functionality since it came out. That's true but Microsoft goes beyond that and they actually integrate debugging symbols + source code with VS.NET 2008. This feature will let you seamlessly step into the .NET framework code while you debug your own application. What is more they provide code with all the comments which from time to time can make huge difference. Of course they don't go mad completely and the licence the code will be released under prevents you from copying it. No hope for a quick catch up for Mono :).

Short explanation why VS 2008 is going to be of much better quality then VS 2005

Emma Williams is talking about how and why Microsoft has changed the way they develop Visual Studio. My favorite change is feature teams. The feature team is a small team of a few people that are responsible for delivery of a feature. The team comprises of developers, testers and project/product managers. They all work very closely together until they deliver which makes them emotionally bound to their task and that's good. There is nothing worse then a bunch of people who don't care what they work on. If testers wait for developers to be finished and then developers wait for testers to be finished and so on then every person works on its own without any notion of being part of a team. If you hear a few times a day "who cares", "I don't care" or "I don't give a s..." then unfortunately most likely you work in such an environment. BTW she was born in Ireland :).

From forestry to IT - channel 9 show

Peter Spiro is one of these guys who took unusual steps to get into IT. It's enough to have a look at him to figure out that he is more then interesting :) .  The whole conversation is about people and how to manage them in a way that both the Company and they benefit from it. It's first time I heard that we need to build properly layered systems just because there are some smart guys out there that want to unplug an old component and replace it with their own - better :).  
The next thing that absorbed my attention was his list of features that a good team should be characterized by:

• trust
• diversity
• no single man show
• shared responsibility
• passion

It looks like a list of obvious things but you would be surprised how many teams lack 2 or more of them. And the last but not least, he knows what the work-life balance is. It was a well spent hour :).

Irish Microsoft Technology Conference - go there to see people

Irish Microsoft Technology Conference is taking place next week. Though it's an overview what's out there in terms of Microsoft technology and thus there are not many sessions that explains things in depth it's worth going there. I can see really great speakers there that can reveal a few secrets having a pint with you :). I'm off to Spain for two weeks thus I will miss this conference.

How the relationship between Apple and Microsoft has developed over the past 25 years

Check out this video.