Software Design/Agile/XP

• Martin contributes (indirectly) to the current software design discussion with the economics of whether its worth it to do good design is his DesignStaminaHypothesis : "Design activities certainly do take up time and effort, but they payoff because they make it easier to evolve the software into the future. You can save short-term time by neglecting design, but this accumulates TechnicalDebt which will slow your productivity later. Putting effort into to the design of your software improves the stamina of your project, allowing you to go faster for longer."

Orcas

• ScottGu talks extensively about VS2008 Multi-Targeting Support. Steve and I have been thinking of just moving our team to using VS2008 but targeting CLR 2 and .NET 3, and not .NET 3.5 which we can not do at this time (we are having a hard enough time convincing banks that .NET 3 is NOT a new version of the CLR but that's a different story). Anyhow, we were concerned about the project and solution file conversions but ScottGu's answers in the comments address that: "If you pick "don't upgrade" on a VS 2005 project, VS 2008 will open it in multi-target mode targetting .NET 2.0.If you say "yes upgrade" on a VS 2003 project, VS 2008 will launch the upgrade wizard like in VS 2005 and allow you to update the project to use a newer version of the framework." I think the issue is still that you can't open the solutions in VS2005 anymore. The other concern we have is that effectively we will be using the "Orcas WinForm" designers rather than the Whidbey ones and what impact that will have to the designer files?

CLR/Silverlight

• Miguel and his team have implemented Silverlight for Unix in just 21 days!! Unbelievable!

Acropolis

• Brad points to some great Acropolis explanations from outside Microsoft