Tag: windows

Office 2007 is a Nightmare

Hey, category managers in charge of IT spend. Want to make yourself a friend of the business for life? I’ve got a secret for you: don’t rubberstamp your CIO’s decision to upgrade to Vista or Office 2007. In fact, tack on a big “reject” to the request or the requisition. And don’t do it to save money. Do it to save your hide.

the comments seem to house a fair amount of microsoft astroturfers

Unyte

Co-browsing is the ability to share a web browser with a remote user, and be able to have that user both see what you’re doing and to drive your web browser so you can see what they’re doing. Obviously you only want to do this with someone you trust, but the implications for distance students are great. Most of the virtual reference packages have this capability, but from what I understand they work to varying degrees of success. Right about this time last year I started fiddling with a service called Jybe, and it worked fairly well, though required a toolbar to be installed by both users, and they haven’t updated that toolbar for Firefox 1.5, so I haven’t played with it in a while.

desktop sharing as a skype plugin sounds great for tech supporting relatives, but they implement the viewer as an applet. how stupid is that? they could piggyback on the nice fw-evading skype network, but no, applets.

Microsoft Branching Strategy

We decided that each team would get its own feature branch, each feature area (multiple teams) would go up to an aggregation branch, and those would lead up to the final main branch. (As such there’s now north of 100 branches in tiers, leading up to 6 aggregation branches.) Teams were free to choose how many sub-feature branches they wanted, if any, and they were free to choose how often they wanted to push up their changes to the aggregation branch. As part of the reverse-integration process, various quality gates had to pass, including performance tests. Due to how comprehensive those gates ended up being, this would take at least 1 day to run, plus perhaps 1-2 days to triage issues if any cropped up; so there was a possibly considerable cost to doing an RI in the first place. However, these gates were essential in upholding the quality of the main branch, and had they not existed, the OS would have never shipped.

the challlenges of the windows scm have always intrigued me. years ago, a paper by markl was leaked – nothing since. so it’s good to hear what is going on in current windows builds.