"The Apprentice" and what it's got to do with the new "open" Microsoft

It’s funny how much publicity those “awful people” on TV Show The Apprentice are getting. Everyone appears to be as hooked on the show as I am.

This week’s edition featured the firing of TWO participants instead of the usual one, and it seems none of us can resist rushing to condemn the ejected wanna-be’s for their hypocrisy and general lack of any kind of ethics or moral backbone. Our businesses would never stoop to the levels these idiots displayed, or so the story goes.

But it seems to me that most working in our industry should be looking at themselves in the mirror before rushing to pass judgement!

We work in an industry that produces software. The main value of that software is in its “intellectual property rights” since anybody can copy or duplicate the physical end results pretty much for free (and if everybody did that then we'd all be in serious trouble).

Yet when I look at the people I've worked with at numerous clients over the last 10 years I think I can count the number of people who DON’T download or buy pirate video’s, don’t “run off a copy of this or that MSDN disc from work so I can use it at home”, don’t use pirate software on the fingers of ... well, pretty much one finger!

Hypocrisy and double-standards are the norm. And dubious ethics now seem so engrained in the whole “culture” of software development I despair for the industry as a whole. But whenever I've brought this subject up in a forum or chat room I'm immediately dismissed as being a “sanctimonious old git”. Well pardon me, but I'd rather be considered sanctimonious than a thief! 'Sanctimonious' I can live with!

A couple of recent experiences really highlighted for me how the complete lack of ethics seems to have become the accepted norm in our industry.

At a recent user group meeting I was asked not to video a certain session because it contained details of a customer application that was ‘confidential’. The somewhat twisted logic seemed to go like this: “We have a confidentiality agreement with an end-client. It’s OK to break that in front of a large number of people in a room, but only if evidence doesn't become available in the form of video on the world wide web”.

Excuse me?! Did you sign a confidentiality agreement or not? If you don’t have the confidence to make the information available to all then why are you making it available to anyone? Confidentiality is NOT a grey area where the shade can be varied as seen fit. It’s a very simple 'black or white' area.

Another example... I keep reading that the “new” Microsoft is “transparent” and “open”. I'm hearing this not just from Microsoft, but from many bloggers whose work I admire and who help to make this industry a fun one to be in. Admittedly I have a bit of an axe to grind here – my experience at MIX08 (arguably the most “open” of all the Microsoft conferences) showed how “open” Microsoft are prepared to be depends on the size of the camera you’re carrying and how “on side” (and known to) the marketing people you really are. But if I read one more “lie” about how fabulously open and transparent Microsoft are from a so-called independent blogger I think I’ll puke!

In the last few days, I've been trying to find out the likely release date for a service pack for a Microsoft product. As a result I’ve been given information that should be in the public domain. The information is trivial and ideally would have appeared on one of the high profile Microsoft blogs as indicated it most likely would be earlier this week. If Microsoft were truly “open” and “transparent” it would have been.

But, presumably because it might (and I really emphasise the word “might”) be perceived in a negative light the information, about a very slight delay, once gleaned, invariably came with a single word prefix attached.

That prefix was the word “confidentially”.

What does that word mean?!

This is a situation I've found myself in MANY times over the last couple of years. Instead of just getting the information from the usual public places one has to ferret around through 'contacts' to get it. It's all so unnecessary and all it does is raise suspicion, uncertainty and doubt.

Microsoft apparently believes that giving information to the chosen few “confidentially” means it's being “open” and “transparent”! How much further do we want to blur the definitions about what these words mean before they become totally meaningless? And what does this Microsoft approach really achieve?!

From Microsoft’s viewpoint I guess it makes a few people feel “special”, and therefore perhaps more likely to spread company propaganda in future. But invariably cliques will grow as the “special” people wink and whisper to each other about what they know and others don’t, while suspicion, paranoia and a complete lack of trust results from those people not deemed “special”.

When Microsoft, and the blogging community as a whole, is much more honest about the conditions under which it’s revealing information (eg "Microsoft paid my flights for this event I'm blogging about", "Microsoft have suggested I restrict myself to the positive aspects of this product if I don't want to be bombarded with emails" etc etc) then maybe it can boast about being “transparent” and “open”.

But until then any such talk is just pissing in the wind.

And it makes those who talk about being open and transparent on the one hand, while colluding with Microsoft 'confidentially' on the other, no better in terms of ethics or morals than those people we're all so eager to criticise on 'The Apprentice'.

So, it turns out I can't spell!

Trying to sort out the video I shot for the first Silverlight UK User Group meeting has been a fascinating, if frustrating, foray into the world of producing video for the web for me.

On my 'emergency' video editing machine (a Dell D820 laptop, albeit a laptop with fast CPU, 4GB memory, oodles of hard drive space and an internal 1920x1200 screen) it takes about 8 hours to render half an hour of video at 720p resolution! Yikes!

That's AFTER I've added the subtitling for any inaudible pieces (audience questions/comments or talks from presenters who just won't wear a radio mic). I'm not sure I'd have bothered with sub-titles if I'd known ahead of time it would take 8 hours to transcribe/edit into the video the questions asked during a simple half hour talk, but with technical subject matter the audio is often more important than the video, and short of insisting every audience member use a mic it's hard to see any other solution to the problem.

But there's a lot of other time taken up by the production process too. Renders not only make your laptop unusable for anything else for ridiculous amounts of time, but they can crash too (with an amusing .NET "Write exception" message from Sony Vegas Pro - who knew it was written in managed code?!) which all adds to the "clock ticking away and I'm getting nowhere" fun.

Even after all that rendering time the resulting half hour video turns out to be far too big (over 1GB!) for any of the free video hosting services to take onboard. So the video then had to spend a couple more hours in Microsoft's Expression Encoder to get it down to a more realistic size (under 250MB). And that shrinking down in size, with viddler's own compression applied on top, sadly means my dreams of 720p hi-def perfection over the web are somewhat dashed! Quite aside from the fact we're still not done with wall clock time!

Add in 4-5 hours for Viddler and/or Vimeo to upload the video, and then a couple of hours on top of that for the hosting service to do its own compression on the resulting uploaded stream and you start to see why what sounds simple ("I'll just record a couple of sessions at a user group and put them on the web") can turn into days of elapsed time and a not insignificant amount of work.

So, I was feeling quite pleased with myself earlier this morning when the first three videos were finally done, uploaded and content approved, until presenter Tim Sneath just mentioned in passing that in the title sequence which starts each and every video I hadn't spelt the word 'inaugural' correctly. Aaaaarggghh! I'm afraid I WON'T be going back through all the video to correct it and then tie up my laptop for another 3 days re-rendering, but the lesson learnt (yet again!) is if you've got a spell checker you should use it! In the meantime I'm wishing I had a top-of-the-range Macintosh and a copy of Final Cut Pro at my disposal!

The first three videos are now available for viewing over on Michelle Flynn's blog. Also a mailing list has been set up for those in the UK interested in the group and discussing Silverlight overall.

One side effect of this work is that launch of The Daily.NET Show has now slipped a week. But I think it's worth the slippage because the content of these user group videos makes them well worth seeing.

Inaugral Silverlight UK User Group Meeting

Earlier this evening I attended the inaugral meeting of the UK Silverlight User Group at Conchango's offices near London Bridge.

The group got off to a cracking start, with over 50 people in attendance (and several more who wanted to attend having to be turned away because of lack of room). The only problem I can see the group having moving forward will be finding a space big enough to hold all those developers and designers who want to attend.

I came away with about three hours of video, in spite of having to stop filming at certain points to avoid capturing 'confidential' or 'controversial' information which is fine for attendees who are known, but can quickly escalate into a mess of a situation if broadcast to the world at large via the web.

To say this was one of the best user group meetings I've attended is a bit of an understatement. What impressed me most was the experience of many of the people present, and the depth of the questions being asked.

Microsoft's Tim Sneath was the main presenter, although we got several quick sessions from others with some great Tips and Tricks from people who've been working with this stuff 'in the real world'. I thought the quality of presentation was really high, and this was a fantastic 'inaugral' meeting for the group, whose organisers have some serious plans ahead with regard to helping the community of Silverlight designers and developers.

Tim's session was excellent, mainly because he very quickly 'deviated from the script' when he realised that what people really wanted was a good Q & A session, rather than a repeat performance of the demo's shown at MIX 08. Lots of good stuff came out, and it was good to see Microsoft staff able to good-naturedly laugh at themselves and the company they work for in the way Tim did.

For those who missed the event, hopefully the video will soon be made available for all to see. Visually there's not a lot going on (especially when questions are coming from people's backs of heads!) and, as with last week's Vista Squad meeting, the lighting in the room was so poor it was hard to get high quality high definition footage. But thanks to the use of radio mics the sound should be decent and the sessions are absolutely worth listening to if you have any interest at all in Silverlight

There are tentative plans for the user group to hold meetings every 8 weeks, but details will become clearer as discussions take place, initially via an email list that will apparently be set up over the next few days. I'll post a link to the videos here on this blog (assuming the group's organisers decide to publish them) once I've finished rendering all the footage.

Podcast interview with "The Social Programmer"

Just after I got back from MIX 08 I did a podcast interview with Craig Murphy for The Social Programmer web site.

We talked about the MIX08 conference and other events, community, new Microsoft technologies, the upcoming Daily.Net Show video podcast and a whole bunch of other stuff besides.

Apparently this podcast (Craig's 42nd) is the longest he's done, which I guess is a polite way of saying I talk far too much! ;-) The signs for my getting The Daily.NET Show running in at under 5 minutes are looking less and less likely as time goes on!

"Heroes Happen Here" Microsoft Launch Event

Yesterday I travelled up to Birmingham for Microsoft's launch event for Visual Studio 2008, SQL Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008.

The event was a bit of a mixed-bag, and developers on Twitter and Channel 9 seem to be quite vocal about being treated as 'second class citizens' (the event focussed more on IT department staff), with many talking about not attending a similar event in the future. For my part I thought it was an event worth attending. Of course that may have more to do with the fact I'm 'between contracts' and so didn't lose a day's pay on top of the travel costs of around £60 than anything else!

Microsoft seem to have abandoned evaluation forms, presumably relying on the fact the event 'sold out' (how can a 'free' event 'sell out'?!) as a measure of its 'success' instead. Their bad! A lot of folk are disgruntled that the much-touted free software for attendees turned out to be something of a 'sleight of hand' confidence trick. The promised 'free copies of Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008' turned out to be evaluation versions, albeit with a full year's evaluation period, with SQL Server actually turning out to be a CTP from 4 months ago. For those of us with MSDN subscriptions this 'swag' is largely irrelevant anyway, but for students who'd rushed to book the event based solely on the promised software it was hard not to feel totally conned! The official explanation from Microsoft is apparently that they had to offer '365 day evaluation versions' instead of the full product "for tax reasons", which strikes me as one of the lamest reasons ever for going back on a promise!

The logistics of the venue were pretty appalling, causing much delay and frustration, particularly for pre-registered attendees who found they had to queue for half an hour just to have their badges swiped, and many are pointing out how much better organised community events like Developer! Developer! Developer! are. Coloured badges were used to denote tracks (I.T. or Developer) but there appear to have been variations on a theme (eg yellow and brown badges for developers with brown badges getting priority) and there are stories of people being turned away from sessions because they had the wrong colour badge, even though there was plenty of room inside the session room, or of rooms being full despite people rushing to them straight from the keynote (which over-ran by over 20 minutes for no valid reason) etc etc.

People also seem to be unhappy with the technical content (if not the speakers) for Visual Studio 2008 - perhaps not surprising given that this newly launched product has actually been in widespread use since it was made available on MSDN back in early November, while these talks were (rightly!) aimed at someone new to the product. For my part, I thought the sessions I attended were all good, given that by necessity they had to be pretty much at the '101' level. No complaints about any of the speakers from me, and even though many found the keynote much too obviously sales-oriented I thought the UK Managing Director managed to give a far more charismatic talk than Ray Ozzie had done a couple of weeks ago at MIX08 in Las Vegas.

The only real disappointment for me was the final keynote - an excellent talk, but one which I'd already seen (and which has been available via video download for some time) at last year's paid-for UK MIX07 event. It was disappointing to have travelled all that way, only to find a months old repeat being the only offering for the last hour-long session of the day.

By common consent the biggest disaster area of the day were the Hands on Labs. Reports of lack of power, missing software files, inappropriate equipment (American keyboards instead of British), lack of readable instructions or even lighting to read instructions abound and I've yet to read a single report that says anything positive about the labs. The Americans seem to handle this sort of thing so much better than we Brits do.

On the positive side the community-organised events all seemed to go down very well. I caught a few of the competitions organised by the NextGen UK crowd and they looked like a lot of fun, and were getting appreciative yelps and cheers from those gathered to watch. In what's becoming a common theme in these reports of conference and community events, the highlight for me was the chance to network and catch up with folks I've met at previous community events.

MIX08 Blogging

I'm blogging all the MIX08 announcements over on the new Daily.NET Show web site. Already announced pre-conference is the new version of Expression Studio 2, available in April.

I'll probably also be using my mobile phone to post snippets of news throughout the conference on twitter 'irascian' account

Recommended Daily Link Blog/Prepping for MIX08

It's been too long since my last blog post, but in the background I've been working on a few things. Technology wise I've been getting to grips with JQuery (which I prefer to Prototype/Script.ac.ulous) and Castle Windsor, an interesting Inversion of Control system that looks more robust, agile and elegant than Microsoft's own upcoming Unity system, currently available as a CTP.

This time next week I'll be in Las Vegas for the Microsoft MIX08 conference event. I'm hoping to be video podcasting from the event on a daily basis in preparation for an eventual launch of The Daily.Net Show which will be a "daily news show" replacement for my daily .NET blog listing summaries that never really got off the ground. Throughout MIX08 video podcasts should be appearing on dailydotnetshow.blogspot.com, so keep an eye on that!

For one of the show's "weekend extra's" it looks like I may also be able to cover the UK launch event for Visual Studio 2008, Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 in Birmingham on March 19th. Discussions with Microsoft's PR company are ongoing, so fingers crossed!

Although Mike Gunderloy's daily .NET link listing stopped at the end of last year, several other folks have risen to the challenge of providing a replacement, and are doing much better than my half-hearted attempt earlier this year. By far and away the best in my view is the one published on Jason Haley's blog - he seems to capture all the useful and important stuff from amongst the horrendous hundreds of brown-nosing "xxx is awesome" posts that pollute the MSDN blog space. If your 'research' time is as limited as mine Jason's blog should be at the top of your list if you want to make sure you don't miss some good stuff out there in the 'blogosphere'.

In the home office I've installed Vista Service Pack 1, which sneaked onto MSDN downloads a week or so ago, albeit hidden under a 'Top 10 Downloads' banner rather than in the main downloads area. This is a 'high risk' patch and is being held up by Microsoft pending lots of reported problems with certain drivers. However on my pre-installed Dell Vista system I was just getting too many blue screens of death, together with an annoying hotfix that kept failing and then re-attempting installation every boot up - problems which have plagued me for a year now! I have to say that for me SP1 for Vista has been a blessing. No blue screens since I installed it, and no "failed" hot fix reattempts either.

I've also got Windows Server 2008 installed in a virtual PC on my vista laptop and that's looking to be in good shape although I haven't really used it in anger yet. No doubt the anger will follow when I try and do real stuff in it, but for now I'm happy with how quickly and easily it installed - it's by far the easiest and most straightforward install experience I've had (and yes, that includes Apple's Leopard OS installation).

Although contract-wise things have been a disaster for me this year (when management keep using the phrase 'a challenging environment' while the troops on the ground repeat a different phrase 'denial of reality', you know you're in trouble) and wretched viruses have taken me down twice (stomach flu and then the 'ordinary' one), technology-wise things are getting exciting with new versions of the MVC framework for ASP.NET, the first look at Internet Explorer 8 and Silverlight 2.0, new Unity CTPs and no doubt some last-minute surprises due to be announced and demonstrated in Las Vegas the week after next. Stay tuned!