Google just refreshed my supply of Gmail invites. I have five to give out, to anyone who wants one. Leave me a comment, and I'll send an invite to you ASAP.

What is Gmail?

Simply put, it is a free web-based email account. It's two main features are 1 gigabyte of mail storage, and improved search capability.

Why do I need to be invited?

Gmail is in a beta period, so access is by invitation only.

Why shouldn't I just wait until Google makes this available to everyone?

Well, say you have a cool email address like coolguy@hotmail.com. If you don't act fast, someone will then register coolguy@gmail.com. Essentially, the quicker you get a Gmail account, the more likely your favorite email address will still be available.

OK, OK. I want one! How can I sign up?

Leave me a comment on this entry. You'll have to leave an email address so I can get an invite to you. My blog uses some (primitive) obfuscation for email addresses, so your address should be safe from spammers.

Update: I am all out of gmail invites. Sorry.

I recently read a weblog entry that claimed, in order to run both the client and server portions of Visual Studio Team System on a single PC (using Microsoft Virtual PC 2004), you would require 3GB of phyiscal memory. Well, my puny home PC only has 1GB of physical RAM, so I might have to go out and buy a new computer in order to experiment with the server aspects of this software.

According to the official Microsoft web page, these are the minimum specs:

Servers:

• 2.6GHz Pentium 4 CPU
• Windows Server 2003
• 1GB RAM for application tier, 1GB for database tier
• 20GB hard disk for application tier, 20GB hard disk for database tier

Client:

• 1GHz Pentium CPU
• Any modern Windows OS
• 256MB RAM
• 3.5GB to 6.0GB hard disk space

So I can certainly see why, if you chose to run the client and the two servers on the same machine, it has to be a hefty machine.

Also realize that the beta software has not yet been fully optimized. So hopefully the “production” version of this application will require less horsepower.

Perhaps a good way to start off my new VSTS blog would be to introduce this exciting new software package to everyone. Some of you may already know of it, but I am sure many others don't.

Disclaimer 1: First, I will preface everything by saying that this software is still in Beta testing. If I do a really good job convincing you of how amazing this software will be, you cannot then drive to the local Best Buy and purchase it. It is not yet for sale. Microsoft expects the software to go on sale mid 2005. I would guess May 2005, but that is still 9 months away from today!

Disclaimer 2: I don't work for Microsoft. (Yet, anyway.) So I do not have access to any secret future plans for VS or VSTS. So if I say “May 2005”, I am really just making a guess. I will try to keep guessing at a minimum, however.

OK, so on to the questions burning on everybody's lips...

Q. What is Visual Studio 2005?

A. Obviously, it is the next version of Visual Studio. The last version was “Visual Studio .NET 2003”. As you can see, Microsoft has dropped “.NET” from its name.

Q. What's new in Visual Studio 2005?

A. VS2005 formerly had the code name Whidbey. Most of what is new falls into four broad categories:

• Integrated software development tools for the full-life cycle (known as Team System)
• New language features for VB.NET and C#.NET
• IDE improvements including support for code snippets and refactoring
• A line of “express“ products for novice users

Q. What is Visual Studio 2005 Team System?

A. Modern software development is a complex process, requiring coordination between many different people. Most of the time, this coordination happens in a chaotic manner: email, project meetings, status reports, and/or “bumping” into people in the office hallway... Do you wonder why 90% of all software projects are behind schedule or fail completely?

VSTS comes with a set of tools designed to improve the entire software development process: from the project management aspects of a project, to the architecture and design, to development, and to testing. Some team members already use versions of the software: the project manager may use MS Project, the architect may use Visio, and the tester may use NUnit. But Microsoft has combined all of those tools under one IDE, and designed them to seemlessly work well together.

(Geez, I sound like an advertisement. If you act now, I will throw in a set of Ginsu knives!)

Q. What tools are in Visual Studio 2005 Team System?

A. The list is long, and at this point I do not have the definitive list. But I'll try to point out some cool features:

• Project workflow: project managers can assign tasks to individual developers within the Visual Studio environment. As developers complete these tasks, the project progress is updated instantly for the project manager.
• Software architecture: has application design tools built in, similar to UML, which allow developers to design an application thoroughly before writing any code. When the time comes to begin development, the tool will automatically generate the code you need to get started.
• Source code control: a vast improvement over Visual SourceSafe
• Unit testing tools: a tool similar to JUnit or NUnit built-in
• Code analysis: a tool that analyzes your code, and reports bad coding practices to you (FxCop)
• Code coverage: a tool that analyzes your unit tests and your code, and identifies areas that are not being tested

Whew! There is more. But my fingers are getting tired.

Q. Any good links?

A. Why, yes! Thanks for asking.

• Visual Studio 2005 Home
• Visual Studio 2005 Team System Home
• Visual Studio 2005 Product Line Overview
• Tools Affected - A long long list of tools that will ship with VSTS and Team System

Til next time!

Today I received the CDs for Visual Studio 2005 Beta 1 in the mail. Yipee! Can't wait to install it and start playing around. Sadly, since Microsoft took so long to ship me these CDs (several weeks backordered), they have since come out with Beta 1 Refresh, which includes the Team System bits that I have been dying to get my hands on.

It appears I am going to be working on a big project over the coming months relating to Visual Studio 2005 Team System. I will get into more details about it here, once the project is official. Needless to say, I am extremely excited about the possibilities.

I should mention that the dasBlog software that I use allows me to assign my entries into categories. You can see a list of them at the right. All of my VSTS entries will be under the “Visual Studio 2005” category, so if you want to only view those and ignore the rest of my entries, bookmark the category or subscribe to the RSS feed as you wish.

I predict we'll see more and more news stories like this. It's a scandal, really.

After 9/11, the U.S. Department of Justice made a lot of noise about terrorist arrests, particularly al Qaeda “sleeper cells“ in Detroit and Albany. But then, at trial, we find out these people might not be terrorists. The government apparently made some evidence up, and hid some that would have helped the defence. So, guess what? The case gets thrown out.

The Detroit case is one of several high-profile setbacks for the Justice Department in recent months. It lost a case last month in Iowa against a college student that who was on trial for using the Internet to recruit and raise money for terrorist causes. In mid-August, federal prosecutors acknowledged possible flaws in key evidence of evidence used in their case against two leaders of an Albany mosque charged with supporting terrorism. And CNN reported last week that Brandon Mayfield, a Muslim from Oregon, who was falsely accused by the FBI of involvement in March's Madrid train bombings, announced that he planned to sue the US government.

This also reminds me of the 1,600 or so people (mostly Muslim men) taken into custody after September 11th. Most of them were held for 2 years, but released without charges.

How long will people put up with the government arresting people without evidence? The traditional method of law enforcement - gather evidence, make a case, arrest, go to trial - might be slow but it works. The new model - arrest, gather evidence, try to bypass a trial and go striaght to sentencing - might be more efficient from the government's perspective, but it appears like 95% of the people arrested for terrorism are released. So what good does that do us?

Does anybody out there want a Gmail account? I have two six invites to send, and no one to send them to.

Drop me a line in the comments section and I'll send them out right away.

Update: I am all out of gmail invites. Sorry.

In some ways, this is way overdue. But the IOC is publicly talking about removing some sports, saying the Olympics are getting too big.

Given that Greece is expected to pay $9 to $12 billion to host the games when all is said and done, this is a good idea. The Olympics are like the stock market of 1999 - a bubble that needs to be burst for the future health of the games.

This dovetails into the controversial debate about some sports people have been complaining about for years. These sports fall into four general categories:

• Subjective sports
• Professional sports
• Unpopular sports
• Sports where many athletes cheat

Subjective sports are all those sports that require a panel of judges (and a complicated mathematical algorithm) to determine the winner. Synchronized swimming comes to mind. But there are many other sports, such as diving and gymnastics that fall into this bucket. I am of two minds - some sports (such as synchronized swimming and rhythmic gymnastics) are, to be blunt, more like entertaining diversions. I think synchronized swimming is like cheerleading in water - not necessary “Olympic”.

Sports such as baseball, soccer, basketball and tennis are too “professional” and also not in the spirit of the Olympics. The olympics should feature sports that, with few exceptions, don't have their own nationally-televised championships.

Now there are some sports that pass the last two criteria (not subjective and not professional) but still could be cut. Equestrian is one example. Even though some of the equestrian events are based on time and points, nobody is tuning into the Athens games wondering who will win equestrian. Same with yachting. It's a waste of time and money to hold the event.

Finally, there are a couple of controversial sports where, for whatever reason, a large number of athletes have been caught cheating over the past few years. These may be the perfect Olympic sports, except for the fact that half of the competitors are using some type of undetectable steroid. I am thinking of weightlifting. Maybe human beings cannot get any better in this sport. No weight-lifting records are left to be broken without medical help. Maybe.

Anyways, it sounds like cutting any sport is a difficult in the beaurocracy-ridden IOC. But I think they realize that this cannot continue. Every organization has to evaluate itself every once and a while and figure out what is working and what is not working. The Olympics are no different.

Here's a link to another good article on this topic.