"Charlene" is a 26 year old "goofy goddess" with a terrific body and 2 Siamese kittens. Her user profile is well-formed, complete, and as far as her favorite dating site, CaliDate.com* is concerned, completely legitimate. However, Charlene's profile is...

Like tens of thousands of other people, I am an avid and daily reader of my good friend Rob Caron's VSTS blog . He is way plugged in, clearly. But Rob is more than that. He is a bloguoso. Lately however, Rob hasn't seemed himself. As possibly occurred...

Are you excited about the potential benefits of migrating from your existing source control and bug tracking tools to Visual Studio Team System? Stymied by bureaucracy and organizational inertia? Common Scenario: different groups in your organization...

In my last post , I lamented email overload and its effects upon me and presumably, many of my co-workers and friends. Did I mention that I LOVE Microsoft? I am a diehard Microsoft customer, fan, employee, and shareholder. I do not read Mini-Microsoft...

Fellow Microsoft Employees (and anyone else who shares my love of the Dilbertesque absurditities of corporate life): If you’re planning to go to the MSPicnic this weekend, PRINT YOUR PICNIC CONFIRMATION EMAIL NOW! The MSPicnic Miscalculation The 2006...

From the dean, Alex Barnett ( RSS ): "MSDN's Coding4Fun has a good intro article on playing with the Flickr API using Flickr.Net API library : "the actual mechanics of communicating with Flickr are relatively simple. The hard part is coming up with the...

In general, I disdain the casual manner in which many people throw around the word "community". As a member of the Microsoft.com Communities and Collaborative Development team, the subtly overloaded nature of the word "community" is particularly troubling...

Over the past few weeks, it has become increasingly apparent that CodePlex is pointed in the right direction, proceeding under its own [community-driven] power, and certain to achieve its destination, with or without a full time product manager: me. Cap...

This project is an awesome addition to the growing list of shared source software on CodePlex.com. " VSCmdShell provides users with a shell window inside the Visual Studio IDE that can be used for Visual Studio commands as well. Current version allows...

Enabling people to convene and interact online in the same rich ways they can offline is the holy grail of social computing. Imagine being able to ask a question, on any subject and at any time, and getting an expert response in near realtime, via your...

Interested in CodePlex? Subscribe to the CodePlex tag on Port 25 . As of the date of this post there are two interviews ( Sara Ford's and mine with timeline thanks to Sara) along with a blog post by Bryan Kirchner in which he discusses "two of the most...

A prospective CodePlex project coordinator recently asked me an intriguing question, "Have you seen any good qualitative data or studies on weight of factors for building successful open source applications?" By way of example, he enumerated a variety...