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 :).

You can't get rid of memory leaks

There are still people out there who think that by having GC they don't have to bother about memory leaks. Well that's not entirely true. I would even say that's a false statement. Next time someone says something like that I will send him/her to Mike Stall

Voice of the Silverlight team in Dublin

Martha Rotter will be presenting Silverlight in Dublin on 27th of September. It might be interesting, depends how deep she wants to dive :).

LondonTube.CompareTo(DublinBuses&Luas)

I'm just back from London where I had really great time with my friends that live in a squat and are busy with their small independent theater. But the thing I want to talk about is the public transport in Dublin. We all know that it sucks but only when you go a city like London you realize how bad it is. To make a long story short it's enough to say that if Dublin was as big as London I would probably have to spent 6 hours on a bus from Cherrywood to the Dublin Airport.

Windows XP - no memory and no CPU required :)

This has happened to me a few times recently. My PC is equipped with 4GB of RAM and every time I use more then 2.5 GB XP starts being unpredictable. Needless to say that actually I was running 5 of 6 VS.NET 2005 instances at that time which more then likely consumed some resources :)

Security B&B way :)

I'm going with my friends over the weekend to climb up the highest mountain in Ireland - Carrauntoohil. I volunteered to book B&B. I sent an email to a few B&B owners and waited for a reply. Majority of them were booked out but one woman offered a family room for us. The interesting part of this story is how she wanted me to send my CC details. Below I show the best snippets from the email conversation.
The women:

"(...)Please give your cc number and expiry date if you wish to secure the booking.  Cash is paid on morning of departure."

Me:

"Is there any website that I can use to book the room? Sending CC number in an email is not secure. Emails are not properly secured and encrypted"

The women:

"People usually send 2 emails with half the number on each"

Just brilliant :)

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 :).