Korby Parnell's Social Software Wunderkammer

In my most recent blog article, Selecting Great UI Text , I suggest that one of the most important things you can do to ensure that you've chosen a great UI text string is, “5. Solicit Feedback Ask your teammates. Ask your customers. The more...

I ran into Redmond's mayor , Rosemarie Ives, and her husband at the annual Derby Days event earlier this month. She and her husband had just returned from a trip to Boston where they took a “wonderful walk through the Fenway gardens.“ They...

When you check out a file in Visual SourceSafe : VSS Gets the latest database version of the file--or the pinned version , if it exists--to your working folder, VSS overwrites the working copy of the gotten* file if, as is usually the case, one...

On a daily basis, I come upon an interesting and often emerging feature difference between Team Foundation source control (aka, Hatteras) and my last product, Visual SourceSafe (aka, VSS). I plan to keep track of these features...where else?...out here...

[ Michael Teper ] “ Mike Gunderloy pointed to the Visual Studio 2005 Product Line Overview page and commented that he doesn't understand why the Express line does not include source control support. This was one of the things that jumped out...

Curious about the source control part of Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation? Tired of looking at feature lists and marketing hype? If so, here’s a word you can chew on for awhile: changeset When one of the hard-working developers...

Let's face it; transparency is risky no matter where you are--with family, among friends, and especially in the workplace--because it exposes our vulnerabilities, both real and imagined. On the whole, corporate managers are risk-averse people, relative...

Jason Barile , test lead for the new Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation source control application (codename, Hatteras) asks a tantalizing little question , “ Anyone have suggestions for a cmd line executable name?” As Jason points...

At our weekly meeting last night, the Redmond Planning Commission was asked to review potential changes to the Transportation chapter * of the city's Comprehensive Plan. Microsoft, ever-protective of the short term interests of its investors, dispatched...

Someday, most large rooftops in urban areas in the United States will be green, not black. David Mellis points to an excellent article in Metropolis Magazine about Chicago's green roofs . My European readers are probably already familiar with the green...

Microsoft has made its living building software applications that are more self-documenting and otherwise easier to use than its competitors. Thus, I was unsurprised to learn that my feature team wants to gather customer ideas for alternatives to the...

Laura introduced me to Peter Provost at the Microsoft MVP Summit a few months ago. His wife was expecting. My wife is expecting. He gave me some good advice. We parted ways. At TechEd, I bumped into Peter again at a Team System design preview. He smiled...

When planning my trip to Raleigh-Durham this week, I had to choose from approximately two dozen hotels, motels, executive suites, and residence inns in the Research Triangle area near the airport. Guess what, I didn't choose the nicest hotel, the one...

Earlier this month, an exciting thing happened: a book was published to a Wiki. To my knowledge, it is one of the first technical computing books to be published to a freely editable WikiWiki on the World Wide Web. Kudos to the individuals who had the...

Andrew Martin, you're the grand prize winner of The "Name That Blog" Contest . Please email me your street address so that I can drop The Prize in the mail. Thanks to everyone who made a suggestion. Your submissions were BRILLIANT! It's unfortunate...

An interview of Rick LaPlante (GM of VS Team System) appears in today's eWeek: Microsoft's VSTS Goal: Creating a Mass Market for Enterprise Tools . What exactly are the goals of Visual Studio Team System? Here are a few telling quotes from a great, albeit...

Do you want to know more about Visual Studio Team System? Do you prefer presentations to whitepapers ? If so, Microsoft’s Channel9 crew has some surreptitiously obtained, Must See TV for you. An Introduction to VSTS: Part I Part II Part III...

Have you ever wondered how Microsoft feature teams make their UI text decisions? Until I came to work at Microsoft, I certainly did. One of the most important word selections of all time was “Start”. Why didn't they choose “Go”...

[ CheckItOut ] “A while ago the SourceSafe product team had a focus week on creating sample applications that solved common community issues. We call them “PowerToys”. The goal for these sample applications is to address frequently asked...

I set my blog dial to hibernate last week to concentrate on well, you know, work and stuff. I come back to discover an overflowing aggregator and... Holy BatBlogs is my team is blogging about some interesting stuff! Folks, I just absorbed as much technical...

My friend Francesco recently rolled out URL123.com , a site that provides some killer URL manipulation features. In his own words, “[URL123] is like tinyurl on steroids...plus, it's in .NET! Link shortening, sharing, and management with some really...

Imagine: You're working on some legacy ASP code in Visual Interdev and you open MSN Messenger. You see two groups: “ASP.NET Friends (Appear Offline)” and “ Classic ASP Friends (Appear Online)“. Your phone rings. A friend named...