Writing ... or Just Practicing?

It's probably safe to say that only a limited number of the few people who stroll past my blog each week were fans of the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band. Or even, while they might recall their 1968 hit single "I'm the Urban Spaceman" (which, I read somewhere, was produced by Paul McCartney under the pseudonym of Apollo C. Vermouth), are aware of their more ground-breaking works such as "The Doughnut In Granny's Greenhouse". So this week's title, based on their memorable non-hit "Can Blue Men Sing The Whites" is pretty much guaranteed to be totally indecipherable to the majority of the population. Except for the fact that the BBC just decided to use it as the title of a new music documentary. Read More...

There's a well known saying that goes something like "Please engage brain before shifting mouth into gear". And another that says "If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen". Yet, after what's now more than a year as a fulltime 'Softie, I've managed to avoid being flamed for any of my weekly diatribes; and neither has anybody pointed out (at least within earshot) how stupid I am. So I suppose it's time to remedy that situation. This week I'm going to throw caution to the winds and trample wildly across the green and pleasant pastures of generics, and all without a safety net. Read More...

A great many years ago, when I was fresh out of school and learning to be a salesman, we had a sales manager who proudly advertised that his office door was "always open". What he meant, obviously, was that we could drop in any time with questions, problems, and for advice on any sales-related issue that might arise. Forgotten what step five of "the seven steps to making a sale" is? Having problems framing your "double-positive questions"? Struggling to find "a response to overcome an objection"? Just sail in through that ever-open door and fire away. Except that the only response you ever got from him was "...you can always rely on one end of a swimming pool". Read More...

I remember when I first started writing books about "Active Server Pages" how we had no end of problems creating sample code that users could easily install and run. There was no SQL Server Express with its auto-attach databases mechanism, no built-in Web Server in Visual InterDev (this was the days before Visual Studio as we know it now), and you couldn't even assume that users had a permanent Internet connection (the vast majority were on a dial-up connection). So you had to create complicate set of scripts and a setup routine, even for ASP samples, that registered the components you needed and populated the database, as well as providing a long list of prerequisites. Read More...

Despite being a writer by profession, and regularly castigating my colleagues for being recalcitrant in reviewing stuff I write, I actually dislike doing reviews myself. When I was an independent author (before I signed my life away to Microsoft), I was often approach by companies offering to pay me to write reviews of their products for their Web sites and literature. Even taking into account the presumed integrity of the author, this type of review seems somehow to be tainted when compared to an independent review by someone who doesn't stand to gain from it. Read More...

In between the usual spates of frantic two-fingered typing of exciting new guidance this week, I've been attempting to expand my brain to the size of a small asteroid (with appropriate apologies to Douglas Adams fans, the size of a planet seems a rather optimistic aim). All this comes about because an increasing amount of stuff in the project I'm working on at the moment, the upcoming version of Enterprise Library, depends on new whizz-bang features of the .NET languages such as lambda expressions, nullable types, anonymous delegates, and implicit typing. As an upgraded VBScripter, much of this might as well have been written in Klingon for all the sense I could make of it. Read More...

Listening to the radio one day this week, I heard somebody describe golf as being "a series of tragedies obscured by the occasional miracle". It struck me that maybe what I do every day is very similar. If, as a writer, you measured success as a ratio between the number of words you write and the number that actually get published, you'd probably decide that professional dog-walker or wringer-out for a one armed window cleaner was a far more rewarding employment prospect. Read More...

I've been trying something new and exciting this week. OK, so it's perhaps not as exciting as bungee jumping or white-water rafting, but it's certainly something I've not tried before. I'm experimenting to see if I can use Team Foundation Server (TFS) to monitor and control the documentation work for my current project. As usual, the dev guys are using agile development methods, and they seem to live and die by what TFS tells them, so it must be a good idea. Maybe. But I suppose there's no room in today's fast-moving, high-flying, dynamic, and results-oriented environment for my usual lackadaisical approach of just doing it when it seems to be the best time, and getting it finished before they toss the software out of the door and into the arms of the baying public. Read More...

It's a good thing that Tim Berners-Lee is still alive or he'd probably be turning in his grave. I was hoping to find that my latest exploration of Web-based Interfaces for Kommunicating Ideas would lead me to some Wonderfully Intuitive Kit Intended for sharing knowledge and collecting feedback, but sadly I'm Wistfully Imagining Knowledge Instruments that should have been around today - and aren't. And, yes, I'm talking about wikis. Read More...

Our little documentation department here at p&p occasionally gets some odd requests. I've done the "write some fictitious stories about corporations that don't exist" bit in the past (as content for a sample application, in case you were wondering), and the "write a technical article about cloud computing but don't mention any products or technologies" thing (it was a very short article). Combine this with an emerging policy of rewriting everything four times when people keep changing their minds about what they want, and you can see why I'm usually quite busy. Read More...

Last week I was creating short introduction videos for our Architecture Guide project. You'd assume that this would be easy enough - write some slides and record the commentary, and then generate a WMV file from the recording. I used Camtasia, which integrates with PowerPoint and makes it really easy to create the recording and edit it. Only then, when I generated the WMV file, did I start to appreciate just how large these kinds of files can be. Read More...

I seem to have spent a large proportion of my time this month worrying about health. OK, so a week of that was spent in the US where, every time I turned on the TV, it scared me to death to see all the adverts for drugs to cure the incredible range of illnesses I suppose I should be suffering from. In fact, at one stage, I started making a list of all the amazing drugs I'm supposed to "ask my doctor about", but I figured if I was that ill I'd probably never have time to take them all. They even passed an "assisted suicide" law while I was there, and I can see why they might need it if everyone is so ill all of the time. Read More...

I just discovered last week that I'm supposed to be able to "moving quickly and lightly", be "as sleek and agile as a gymnast", and be "fleet of foot". Either that or I'm supposed to be an X-ray and Gamma ray astronomical satellite belonging to the Italian Space Agency. Not much hope of any of these happening, I guess. Probably I shouldn't have decided to search the Web and see what "agile" actually means (and, in case you are wondering, the Italian satellite is called Astrorivelatore Gamma ad Immagini LEggero. Read More...

I love how the Visual Studio Document Explorer (help viewer) has a topic named "Help on Help". I've often wondered whether it should say "Help Upon Help", like there was several layers piled up on top of each other. Or how, if you can't figure out how to use the Help file, a help topic within it would be useful. Still, I suppose it's better than the old days when you had help items such as "The Range property sets or returns the range" and "To close the window, click the Close button". Read More...