Comments

Variety is the spice of life so I had no problems with the content. If nothing else it's interesting to see three big 'higher ups' sharing their thoughts with us about the way they work, so it's all good even if as a developer it might come across as relatively free of the technical nitty gritty that is our main interest .

I did find the camera switching and movement distracting, particularly with the camera's being so far apart so that the perspective of where the speaker was looking kept switching all over the place. But this is hard to fix in a fairly ad-hoc situation when you have three different folks all interacting quite quickly but addressing themselves to a fixed position interviewer who isn't moving.  The dreary "single static fixed position" for filming and shaky wobbly cam that can result when trying to focus on the person that's actually talking gets rather dull after a while.

Personally I don't think the usual Channel 9 "single camera in a fixed position" style would have worked given there are three people all trying to share equal time.

Good stuff and the weekly show is getting better and better with each episode. 

Nice to see the production values improving too (not just a logo, but coloured lighting and stuff too - cool!). Keep this rate of improvement up and you'll be up there with the 100 million dollar movies by the end of the year.

Seriously, good job which contrasts nicely with the other Channel 9 videos.  Friday night (UK time) is becoming "Watch Channel 9 night" around here

I didn't think Gilad was arrogant - he just had a very dry sense of humour. And like many that are (to use the American term) "super-intelligent" his "social" skills are perhaps not as developed as they are for most of us who don't have a fraction of his ability or talent.

Good video - beautifully controlled by Charles. A weaker interviewer would have struggled to get as much stuff out of his interviewees or would have taken offence at the perceived "arrogance" on display.

Thanks.

TommyCarlier wrote:

If you've won over Irascible Ian, you must have done a really good job

To quote despair.com "Mediocrity: It takes a lot less time and most people won't notice the difference until it's too late". And while that may be the mantra of the masses, SOME of us have standards and look at the long term and reality

But you're right - they have done a really good job.

Great second show guys.

Love the title graphics and the way Dan and Brian balance each other out.

Most of all I like the fact it's not much more than 20 minutes long.

Good to have this broken down into digestible 15 minute chunks. (Looking forward to part 2).

Thanks for listening on the "videos need to be shorter" front

Rossj wrote:  I'm only being negative because everyone else is

Errrm, no! Everyone else is busy "living the dream" telling the world how excited and passionate they are about xxxxx, without actually stopping for a second to think through what they're saying or looking at the practicalities of ONLY being passionate about something instead of critiquing it because after all, this time next year they can move on and be equally passionate and excited about whatever it is someone's dreamed up to replace xxxxx.

Which is how things got into this mess in the first place!

FX: retires to seat by the fireplace in the corner marked 'Reserved for old curmudgeons'   

staceyw wrote:



irascian wrote: And pardon me for not drinking the KoolAid but where is source control integration (with Team Foundation Server) for the Expression products - this is pretty basic stuff that's missing even after all this time, but curiously no mention is made of it.

You can use TFS for any files (including Expression).  You can do this today.  Or are you talking about integration within Expression?

Perzactly. The Microsoft sales pitch says designers can live in their own cosy world of Expression products (cosy because they're fairly familiar in that they 'borrow' a lot of look and feel/user interaction from traditional Adobe/Macromedia products) away from that nasty developer-y thing called Visual Studio  The strategy says that they can happily share everything with developers asis instead of developers having to manipulate things or adapt them, but things can get very messy if developers have everything in Visual Studo under Team Foundation Server control (which they SHOULD have) while designers are out in limbo land happily changing the same resources in Expression which aren't under any kind of similar check in/check out source control system.

In the real world of changing requirements and modern software development this just smacks of a disaster waiting to happen, unless I'm missing something fundamental here!

Aren't we just getting the same tired "designer/developer separation" scenario to sell the Expression/Visual Studio products that was being over-sold at the first MIX two years ago? We should have moved on by now, and yet the same old overly-simplistic platitudes are being spouted out as if everything was there today. If the world really was this simple every web site would have been written in Flash 5 years ago!

According to this video we now have Designer/Developer integration at "No cost"?!! - excuse me, last time I looked Expression Studio was the same sort of price as the old tools it replaces from rival companies that are much more in evidence and proven tools that designers are reluctant to move away from.  But that's OK because we're now "Fully Integrated because we have Visual Studio 2008". Funny how the need for that wasn't mentioned when the same stuff was being over-sold 2 years ago.

And pardon me for not drinking the KoolAid but where is source control integration (with Team Foundation Server) for the Expression products - this is pretty basic stuff that's missing even after all this time, but curiously no mention is made of it.

There is so much rewriting of history going on here (it's taken two years of feedback that designers weren't being catered for? Come on guys the whole point of MIX was that it was touted as being the first Microsoft conference for designers as well as developers - has it really taken you two annual conferences and two years to realise you weren't actually meeting designer needs? Comments about the difficulty of getting designers on board were being made even BEFORE the first MIX and yet here we are talking about changing the agenda as if that's magically going to change everything and designers are all going to rush to attend because Microsoft say they've taken on feedback from two years ago?!!

I'm looking forward to MIX08, but please let's not fool ourselves. Simply repeating the words "Passion", "enthusiasm" and "Web 2.0" every year MIX comes around isn't going to change things and if MIX really is "about the conversation" why has so little been learnt from two years of "conversation" that have already been had?

rupakg wrote:

Great tool. I have a writeup at
http://developershelf.blogspot.com/2007/11/visual-studio-2008-rtm-version-released.html

 Most would expect "writeup" to have some sort of comment or review so if you're going to shamelessly tout a Google ad-infested blog post that is just a link to the same material that's been posted here please make it clear that's what you're doing!