Overheard in the halls on the hill above Redmond:

• It seems that the the C# language is to be redesigned to be more palatable to Visual Basic developers—especially those whose first name is Mortimer. Microsoft plans to make the base font larger and make the language case insensitive—but only if developers use all lower case. In addition, the C# language’s optional semicolon will be disabled by default. As developers type Dim, Visual Studio will automatically beep (loudly) and convert the declaration to proper C# syntax. There is no truth to the rumor that if Visual Basic developers attempt to use C#-only features that 110 volts be routed to the mouse. It’s really just 90 volts (except in Japan and the UK where it’s slightly higher.
• We also heard that plans to “sim ship” the localized versions of Visual Studio 2005 have been abandoned. Apparently, the current schedule would force the User Education team to ship the documentation next week—ready or not. This eliminates the plans to mark out last-minute changes using big black pens sometime late in the production cycle. The final decision to abandon the sim ship concept was precipitated by the understanding it was going to take three additional months to translate the doc into French, Kurdish and Louisianaian. The red-state versions are also expected to further delay shipment because of unanticipated changes required by the politically correct police. For example, many of these states require that all code samples that use “foo” or “bar” (or combinations thereof) be expunged as the post “Saving Private Ryan” public now knows what the acronym means. It was suggested that the more appropriate word “Fred” be used but that term has also been tainted through its association with a discredited version of Visual Basic. No, Microsoft has not decided to stop shipping documentation altogether and refer customers with questions to their support sites in Afghanistan—it seems they could not get enough phone lines installed.
• We've seen plans to release a new $12.95 PCI adapter card that permits PC systems to run Xbox games. Retailers were assured that sales of Xbox consoles would not be adversely affected as the price of the Xbox is going to be reduced to $9.00 (Canadian)—they hope to make up the loss per unit in volume.  
• An undisclosed member of the SQL Server team announced that they are going to actually begin speaking to the Visual Studio team. Apparently this decision was made after the data engine team discovered that the Visual Studio team had renamed ADO classic to ODO (old data objects), and ADO.NET to NDA (new data objects) and then again to ADAOL (another data access object layer). At this point they decided to open a permanent teletype link to ensure that the two teams are better coordinated. This will be implemented as soon as they decide on a network protocol.
• In an effort to get in touch with more small offices worried about security, Microsoft has released their new USB 2.0 shredder. The new and improved version is capable of shredding up to eight documents a second (staples and all). Unlike the previous version that balked at pages longer than 800 words or documents that contained too many sticky similes, the USB 2.0 version chews up documents faster than accessing that web site referred by your cousin from Cleveland.   

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1 April, 2005