DevBlog

Another high level Microsoft Google fighter is leaving (story here). Vic Gundotra, who has been a general manager for platform evangelism and the guy that hired Scoble years ago, has announced he is leaving and will take a one year sabatical per his non-compete agreement, then join the company he's been fighting...Google.

Last week, another high-level Google fighter left. Martin Taylor was a corporate VP who was in charge of marketing Microsoft Live and MSN.

Many are saying that these people see the writing on the wall and that Google will take an even bigger chunk of online services away from Microsoft. The timing is curious to me. Could it be I'm not the only that has concerns about Ray Ozzie?

If you haven't taken a look at Office 2007, you need to. It's radically different. I've decided to dive in and all my conference presentations for fall are being done with Word and PowerPoint 2007. Be warned...things are not where they used to be and some things are not in logical places. For example, I was looking for the Word option that allows you to change the template that a document uses. In Word 2003, it's Tools > Templates and Add-Ins. In Word 2007, you need to go under File > Word Options, then check the Show Developer tab in the Ribbon, go to the Developer tab and there is the option. Changing a template is NOT a developer option. Hopefully this one will get moved before RTM.

If you haven't seen Office 2007, you can test drive it, download it, or get more information.

Last week I blogged here about my gripes with how people provide their RSS feeds. One of those gripes is with feeds that don't provide the entire posting, but only a summary. Andrew MacNeill followed up here by agreeing with me, but also pointed me to a tool called Fetchlinks that will bring down the entire feed when only a summary is provided. I've been using Fetchlinks for a few days now and can say that it works as advertised. If you're using the NewsGator plugin for Outlook, check out Fetchlinks.

I regularly apply the Microsoft Security updates, usually the day they come out. But one thing that has always annoyned me in the past because it doesn't work right, is the Outlook Junk Email Filter. It seems that it is update every month and every month, it seems to forget things that I told it were spam during the previous month. Why can't it remember this? I was hoping that Outlook 2007 would behave better, but alas, it doesn't.

You probably already know that Pinnacle Publishing, the company that publishes FoxTalk 2.0 was sold earlier this year to Eli Research. You probably have seen postings from Andy Kramek and Marcia Akins that they are moving their column to Advisor Guide to Visual FoxPro. Today I got the June issue of FoxTalk 2.0 and it comes with changes brought to it by Eli Research. A few things caught my eye in the new layout...none of which I like. First, there seems to be fewer pages. Granted, that could be due to a lack of material rather than a decision from the new owner. Second, the article titles use a smaller font and are easy to miss. Finally, the content has changed to a three-column layout. In my first reading of an article, I found it more difficult to read. However, one good thing is the bullet points at the beginning of an article that lets you see at a glance what the article is about. If you're a FoxTalk 2.0 subscriber, be sure to fill out the online survey. The link is in the "Editor's Note" on the back cover.

Earlier this month, the Yankee Group announced results of a new study that showed Windows Server 2003 was more reliable than all versions of Linux, but all server operating systems have high reliablility. The research was not sponsored.

Here's a great blog entry from Jason Zander, the General Manager of the .Net Framework at Microsoft. Jason tells you that the rename from WinFX was no big deal, as I said here. He also gives insite into what's coming.

So you have a blog. So do I. So does everyone else...or so it seems. But the big question is, how do you provide your RSS feed? Do you provide an Atom feed? Is it RSS? Both? Here are a couple of rules that I follow when subscribing to a blog.

First, you must provide a link on the blog for subscription. I don't care if it's RSS or Atom. Either will work. But, if you don't have a link, my aggregator (News Gator) won't find the feed and I won't go looking for it.

Second, your feed must provide the entire blog entry. If you only provide the first few lines, I won't subscribe either. Why? A couple of reasons. First, News Gator downloads what's in the feed. This means I can download, then go offline and read the content. If it's not all there, I can't get to it. Second, and you can call me lazy on this one, if I am online, I don't want to have to click to read everything. Sorry...but of you have a blog, you obviously think you have something to say and want people to read...so make it easy for them to do so. FYI, if you change your feed to only provide a few lines, I'll unsubscribe you.

One more thing. FeedBurner is a great place to provide your subscriptions.

Another great conference (or so I'm told) is the FoxPro DevCon in Prague, Czech Republic. I'm told it's fantastic. I'll have to believe that. I've never been there. But, I will be speaking in Prague September 11 and 12. I have several sessions...Igor really wants to get his money's worth. Topics are "Using Windows Enterprise Service (COM+) with Visual FoxPro", "Object Thinking", "Introduction to Windows Presentation Foundation", and "Introduction to Windows Communication Foundation". I've heard for sometime that Prague is one of the great cities in the world. I'll be spending a few days site seeing after the conference. If you're in Europe, you may want to check out this conference.

One of the great conferences around in Southwest Fox in the Phoenix area. This will be the third year for the conference (October 19-22) and Bob puts on a great show. I'm excited that I'll be speaking again this year. My topics will be Agile Software Development and Designing with UML. Hope to see you there!

SendaX is officially now VFPX. Here's Doug Hennig's posting from the Universal Thread.

The votes are in and the winner as the new name for SednaX is VFPX. VFP.Next was very popular too, but VFPX won by a few votes. Thanks to everyone who voted.

Watch for an announcement about the impeding move to CodePlex.com plus a new logo for VFPX.

If you haven't heard of SednaX, please see http://www.gotdotnet.com/codegallery/codegallery.aspx?id=0826d7a6-1dab-4a71-8e70-f2170c3c1661. Yes, I know it's an ugly URL; hopefully the CodePlex one will be cleaner (www.codeplex.com/vfpx would be nice).

So, Bill Gates is stepping down. We all knew it would happen someday. Turns out that someday is two years from now. Microsoft is touting how things will be business as usual. But I have some major concerns about Ray Ozzie, the creator of Bloated Goats...errr..Lotus Notes. I use Bloated Goats everyday and without a doubt it is the biggest piece of junk I use on a regular basis. It really gets in the way of how I work. And I'm not the only one. Many, many others at the office have said the same thing. I shudder to think of Office becoming more like this piece of junk...and now that Ray's in charge, it very well could. If it does, that will be the day I finally install OpenOffice.

Last week on his blog, Soma announced that Microsoft has officially christened WinFX as .Net Framework 3.0. The blogosphere has both criticized and praised this move. You can read some the reactions here:
Sam Gentile
Rocky Lhotka
Chris Sells
Don Box
Brad Abrams
and here
Microsoft Monitor

I say, what's the big deal? It's simply renaming the thing to follow the scheme Microsoft has been using for years. I agree that the renaming is for the better, although WinFX was a much cooler name than .Net Framework 3.0. The renaming makes sense. A framework is used to write applications and in the future, applications will be written using former WinFX components. However, in the grand scheme of things, does it really matter what it's called?

Microsoft has finally seen the light and published a public wiki. Be sure to read the four license agreements before joining.

Much has been posted about the most recent Microsoft vs. Adobe feud after which Microsoft pulled PDF support from Office 2007 (which is very cool). I can't add much except to say that industry watch group Microsoft Monitor talked about it and posted their interpretation of what's going on in There's More to This Story.