While it's evident that Microsoft is staffed with a lot of top-notch people, history has empirically demonstrated that they have quite a few dregs as well: Just recall how disastrously the whole .NET thing was handled circa-2000.
For those who forgot, suddenly every product (including those finished or on the verge of being finished) became a part of the .NET vision, even if they had absolutely no interaction with the .NET technology stack: Windows Server.NET, Exchange.NET, Messenger.NET, SQL Server -- all a part of the .NET generation -- just as Microsoft declared everything in the generation before a part of the DNA vision (I still hear developers talking about "Microsoft DNA", not really sure what they're talking about).
As a developer who was heavily involved with the betas of what we call .NET today - a runtime and a framework, and the associated tools, for building next generation solutions - I really had no idea what .NET was in Microsoft parlance. Just as ActiveX got muddled into a meaningless term, .NET was being hijacked to basically mean "buy whatever is new or coming out soon".
Eventually that insanity stopped, and .NET collapsed down to a sortof virtual-machine runtime, a framework, and a set of tools. .NET 1.0 was one runtime, one framework, and Visual Studio.NET 2002. .NET 1.1 was a new runtime, a new framework, and Visual Studio.NET 2003. .NET 2.0 was a new runtime, an expanded framework, and Visual Studio 2005 (note the dropping of .NET on the naming, given that Visual Studio, as always, also makes non-.NET applications). There are countless assemblies and extension libraries available targeting each of them, and of course I can make libraries tomorrow that target .NET 1.0, .NET 1.1, or .NET 2.0, and it doesn't magically evolve them into .NET 3.0.
Well it looks like Microsoft is at it again. They've decided that Vista's technology platform, WinFX (which will be partially backported), is so great that it can't be just a set of assemblies or systems that the .NET runtime interacts with. No, it must be .NET 3.0! So now if you have the .NET 2.0 runtime, the .NET 2.0 Framework, targeting it with Visual Studio 2005, and you add in the WinFX framework...voila, you have .NET 3.0.
Insanity. Absolute, unbelievable insanity. Perhaps there's some amazing explanation -- for instance that their April Fools project ran a little long, and they just got the output out -- but I suspect it is just more of the same that we saw circa-2000. Some short-term euphoria over a gonna-be-released-soon project has them screwing with the terminology yet again.
Already the boards are full of "So....does this mean WinFX comes with LINQ?" (LINQ is one of the technologies promised for the next real wave of .NET)
To avoid entries becoming a "wall of text" -- especially the lengthy outings -- I've long borrowed from the Philip Greenspun school of online articles and intermixed irrelevant, largely random photographs.
Generally I finish the entry, and then quickly select one, two, or three recently taken shots -- shots with zero correlation to the story in question -- and stick them in. It adds a bit of color, and I've gotten some comments that people enjoy the diversion. As a side-effect, it's a great example of subjective interpretation, because some readers build their own explanation for how each picture fits with the story (I've gotten a few emails describing these interpretations, and it is truly fascinating. A few had me convinced that I must have subconsciously thought that the picture represented X, the explanation was so compelling).
A small amount of extra bandwidth for a little extra color and diversity in the entries.
I recently got an excellent bit of feedback from a longtime friend and associate: They enjoyed the pictures, but found that they made visiting the site during work hours an almost covert activity. Pictures of my daughter playing in a stream, night falling on a drive-in, or some orangutans at the zoo, they felt, would give a passerby or suspicious boss the feeling that they were slacking away reading kidsplayinginstreams.com, or driveinenthusiast.com, or zoopics.com. Knowing how entirely unenlightened many workplaces are, I immediately appreciated exactly what they were saying.
As such, from here on in I'll avoid unrelated pictures, perhaps sticking to pictures of circuit boards and control flows.
Completely Offtopic - Several days back I was stuck driving behind a huge late-model Chevy Suburban in an industrial park. What struck me as absurd wasn't the vehicle -- some people actually need a vehicle of such size, even if most don't -- but the way they carefully swerved to avoid every single manhole cover on the street: Undulations in the road of less than a CM, which are filtered out in the shocks of even the smallest of econoboxes, had this person doing panic avoidance maneuvers.
Irony in vehicle choices.