• Nero 6 crashes on app startup
• Burn to iso type cd prompts me to insert disk
• Doesn’t auto refresh after cd or dvd burn so that the explorer looks empty.

I’m learning a bit about c# 3.0 over at a developer.com article. Following up from anonymous methods in v2 is anonymous types. Also there are extension methods, Lambda expressions and query expressions

WSJ has an article about how the Quality Gates came about. One of my personal beliefs (in addition to some that were stated in the WSJ peice) was that test in windows had a much heavier workload dealing with xpsp2 then most dev teams, which meant that developers focused on Longhorn while Test was focused on xpsp2. Code was getting checked in and the normal quality controls weren’t getting followed. Each new build of the old Longhorn, just kept getting worse and worse until eventually the decision to restart had to be taken. At the layer of the OS I work at, we more or less didn’t lose any work outside of proving that our code met the new quality gates and checking it back into the product.

BrentBlog reminds me of the constant effect that we redmondites are always dealing with. Windows XP was a sureal experience, all the new features and experiences were well grooved familliar friends when it finally came out.

Since then, the feature work seems to have gotten “completed” further and further from when it finally ships. All the feature work we did for Windows XP sp2 was done for almost a 3/4 of a year before it was released, and the Windows Server 2003 sp1 work was done even earlier then that. Even now as Longhorn Beta 1 marches to completion, my team has finished all of our big features months ago, and Longhorn still has a way to go before shipping. Some of this is a measure of Window’s not quite speedy code velocity, and some of it is that my team works on infrasturcture peieces which gets done much earlier then a lot higher level/user facing OS components, but most of the time is integration and stabalization. 

I also agree about how fustrating it can be to have fixed so many customer pains that we hear about, but only in a product that you haven’t shipped yet. Working on IIS6 was the most extreme version of that feeling I’ve experienced. It’s a feeling I’ve seen mirrored by MVPs when they tells us about a product problem and we tell them that we have fixed it in the next version.

However, even with the pain it can be to dogfood pre beta software, working here is an experience of living a couple years in the future.