Alvin Ashcraft’s Posterous

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drool...

It’s no secret that I’m a TFS skeptic.  I don’t really like the tool, and feel that it adds more friction than value.  Of course that’s just my opinion, and it’s easy to just dismiss my comments and go about your day (if you don’t agree with me).

Jason Barile has always been friendly and eager to help address some of the issues I’ve had with 2.5 years working with TFS.  Recently he offered to have a conference call with himself and a few other members of his team (they work on TFS).  I have to hand it to Jason for being so open & patient with us opinionated loud-mouths.

Anyway, here is a brain-dump of the things we talked about.  It’s really raw, but shows most of the pain points that I have (and I believe others do as well).

A really nice brain dump of things that are lacking in TFS source control.

Here at Download Squad, we like saving money. We love finding freebies, and we're certainly not ashamed to walk up to the cash register with a fistful of coupons. Since the announcement of the Windows 7 pricing scheme, we've been looking for ways to cut the costs to make the move.

We've compiled a list of seven ways you can get that Windows 7 goodness without shelling out quite as many bucks. Read on for savings!

Earlier today the ASP.NET team launched a new Microsoft Ajax CDN (Content Delivery Network) service that provides caching support for AJAX libraries (including jQuery and ASP.NET AJAX).  The service is available for free, does not require any registration, and can be used for both commercial and non-commercial purposes.

Tornado is available under the Apache open source license. A basic demo of Tornado showing the commenting feature is available here.

Developers will now be able to tap into one of the core infrastructure pieces that made FriendFeed tick so well. While other services (like Twitter) tend to have a lot of trouble to scale up when they grow, FriendFeed never ran into these problems and Tornado was surely one of the main reasons why the site managed to stay up and running even when demand spiked during major events.

Here is what developers will get when they implement Tornado according to Bret Taylor:

• All the basic site building blocks - Tornado comes with built-in support for a lot of the most difficult and tedious aspects of web development, including templates, signed cookies, user authentication, localization, aggressive static file caching, cross-site request forgery protection, and third party authentication like Facebook Connect. You only need to use the features you want, and it is easy to mix and match Tornado with other frameworks.

• Real-time services - Tornado supports large numbers of concurrent connections. It is easy to write real-time services via long polling or HTTP streaming with Tornado. Every active user of FriendFeed maintains an open connection to FriendFeed's servers.

• High performance - Tornado is pretty fast relative to most Python web frameworks. We ran some simple load tests against some other popular Python frameworks, and Tornado's baseline throughput was over four times higher than the other frameworks

Latest News:

September 10, 2009

The CodePlex Foundation, a non-profit foundation formed with the mission of enabling the exchange of code and understanding among software companies and open source communities, launched today, September 10, 2009.

Incorporated as a 501.c6 non-profit, the CodePlex Foundation was created as a forum in which open source communities and the software development community can come together with the shared goal of increasing participation in open source community projects. The CodePlex Foundation will complement existing open source foundations and organizations, providing a forum in which best practices and shared understanding can be established by a broad group of participants, both software companies and open source communities. Initial funding for the Foundation comes from Microsoft Corporation.

Sam Ramji will serve as interim President of the Foundation. He will be supported by an interim Board of Directors, whose other members are Bill Staples, Stephanie Boesch, Miguel de Icaza, Britt Johnston, and Shaun Walker. Mr. Ramji and the interim Board will immediately begin a search for a permanent Executive Director, who will manage the day-today operations of the Foundation, as well as a permanent Board of Directors and a Board of Advisors.

There are a number of ways for individuals and companies to participate in the Foundation - via sponsorship, or by becoming a member of the Board of Directors or Board of Advisors. To explore participation or propose a candidate for the Board of Directors or Board of Advisors, visit the Participate section of the Foundation website. Over the coming months, the Board will determine how projects are accepted as it defines project governance, which will provide clarity on how individuals or companies can contribute projects.

The Foundation's bylaws can be viewed here. Biographies of Mr. Ramji and the interim Board of Directors can be viewed here. For more information about the CodePlex Foundation, please review our FAQs here, or call 206-839-8521.

Click through to jeez.eu for the list...