Re:It will be $13/Mo after 1st year. XBox Live = D
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Did you make that up, or by some miniscule chance are you able to back that up with some source and give us just the tiniest hint that you might not be talking out of your arse?
Which is great until said audience member develops a brain tumour and sues your ass 10 years down the road when it is proven that Bluetooth has been mutating genes in people's pants, other hands, and foreheads since day one.
Forgive my mid-atlantic spelling, for I am confused. Perhaps it's my bluetooth phone, or my microwave helmet.
Billy boy went over to Cambridge a while back and gave them an enormous grant. Microsoft and the Computer Science department now work very much hand in hand (in a great new campus building), but the emphasis seems to be that Microsoft benefits from the research being done by the CS lab, and gives it a practical channel to reach mainstream audiences.
Before that, Olivetti Research had a lot to do with the CS lab and a lot of that was very fruitful too (see WinVNC for an example).
One of my old supervisors and a nut on language theory went to Microsoft when they came to Cambridge and has had much success turning his research into practice. The underlying language model of.NET has influences from the academic research done at the University (and of course from elsewhere).
Point is, partnership between academia and business can work very well, and if taking a measly class in a language that actually implements excellent OO constructs and principles as part of a computer or engineering course causes people upset, I really think they need to reassess their thoughts on the purpose of those courses. Especially since such a partnership might subsidise the costs of going to college, which is borderline prohibitivein the US. I've seen so many people claiming to know OO that are clueless on the topic and whose code is so very confused that I suspect OO teachers don't understand the principles properly.
I had to rely on Modula 3 and a couple of other languages, and abstract language theory. Hardly practical, but at the time there was no language that elegantly encompassed the teachings. I ended up working with Smallworld's Magik language which had no decent IDE, but which implements some excellent OO principles. C# is the first mainstream language to really cleanly implement these things. Java's not bad, but it's just not clean.
I have my reservations about some of Microsoft's business practices, but people need to see that there is also a good side to Microsoft, and C# is just one excellent example of that.
I guess this won't go down well, but we use Mickeysoft's SourceSafe for all our version control and I would recommend checking it out. Admittedly there's the cost factor involved in that, and the administration. However, having used CVS for a while, there are limitations in that software that were hard to work around, and administration was no breeze either. No doubt it's improved in the past two and a half years, but I can't comment.
By far the best system I've used is Clearcase, but that requires an enormous effort in administration (we had 3 full-time and 2 part-time admins on it for a project spanning multiple continents and with some 80 developers, and that was just in one of the offices - I have no idea about the others). That was back before it was sold to Rational and running on HPUX though, and I've heard terrible stories about the performance of the Windows client. Oh, and it costs an absolute bomb.
My experience has been that a 30 minute course for the non-technical will bring them sufficiently up to speed on SourceSafe. A well structured SourceSafe database and a couple of clicks can allow non-technical people access and control over their documents at a centralised network location whilst maintaining version control. Note that the structure of the folders (Projects in SS terminology) is worth investing time in figuring out because it can make a world of difference to how accessible your documents will be - and that's a large part of the problem when you're dealing with non-technical people.
This of course presumes that you want a system that handles both code and document control. There are dedicated document revision control systems out there, but I have not had experience of them. At one point we built our own simple one, but I was never fully convinced of the benefit of doing that, though it leads me to believe that good commercial products may not be as plentiful as hoped for.
For the cheapest route, CVS is probably best. There are other GUI solutions available than PCVS, though I haven't tried them out, and I don't know how well they're supported. I presume you've found this page already. A quick perusal and TortoiseCVS seems a fair approximation to what you want (I presume your users are technical enough to use Windows Explorer if they are writing Powerpoint presentations), though their website is down at the moment (perhaps that's a bad sign).
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Did you make that up, or by some miniscule chance are you able to back that up with some source and give us just the tiniest hint that you might not be talking out of your arse?
Which is great until said audience member develops a brain tumour and sues your ass 10 years down the road when it is proven that Bluetooth has been mutating genes in people's pants, other hands, and foreheads since day one.
Forgive my mid-atlantic spelling, for I am confused. Perhaps it's my bluetooth phone, or my microwave helmet.
Billy boy went over to Cambridge a while back and gave them an enormous grant. Microsoft and the Computer Science department now work very much hand in hand (in a great new campus building), but the emphasis seems to be that Microsoft benefits from the research being done by the CS lab, and gives it a practical channel to reach mainstream audiences.
Before that, Olivetti Research had a lot to do with the CS lab and a lot of that was very fruitful too (see WinVNC for an example).
One of my old supervisors and a nut on language theory went to Microsoft when they came to Cambridge and has had much success turning his research into practice. The underlying language model of .NET has influences from the academic research done at the University (and of course from elsewhere).
Point is, partnership between academia and business can work very well, and if taking a measly class in a language that actually implements excellent OO constructs and principles as part of a computer or engineering course causes people upset, I really think they need to reassess their thoughts on the purpose of those courses. Especially since such a partnership might subsidise the costs of going to college, which is borderline prohibitivein the US. I've seen so many people claiming to know OO that are clueless on the topic and whose code is so very confused that I suspect OO teachers don't understand the principles properly.
I had to rely on Modula 3 and a couple of other languages, and abstract language theory. Hardly practical, but at the time there was no language that elegantly encompassed the teachings. I ended up working with Smallworld's Magik language which had no decent IDE, but which implements some excellent OO principles. C# is the first mainstream language to really cleanly implement these things. Java's not bad, but it's just not clean.
I have my reservations about some of Microsoft's business practices, but people need to see that there is also a good side to Microsoft, and C# is just one excellent example of that.
I guess this won't go down well, but we use Mickeysoft's SourceSafe for all our version control and I would recommend checking it out. Admittedly there's the cost factor involved in that, and the administration. However, having used CVS for a while, there are limitations in that software that were hard to work around, and administration was no breeze either. No doubt it's improved in the past two and a half years, but I can't comment.
By far the best system I've used is Clearcase, but that requires an enormous effort in administration (we had 3 full-time and 2 part-time admins on it for a project spanning multiple continents and with some 80 developers, and that was just in one of the offices - I have no idea about the others). That was back before it was sold to Rational and running on HPUX though, and I've heard terrible stories about the performance of the Windows client. Oh, and it costs an absolute bomb.
My experience has been that a 30 minute course for the non-technical will bring them sufficiently up to speed on SourceSafe. A well structured SourceSafe database and a couple of clicks can allow non-technical people access and control over their documents at a centralised network location whilst maintaining version control. Note that the structure of the folders (Projects in SS terminology) is worth investing time in figuring out because it can make a world of difference to how accessible your documents will be - and that's a large part of the problem when you're dealing with non-technical people.
This of course presumes that you want a system that handles both code and document control. There are dedicated document revision control systems out there, but I have not had experience of them. At one point we built our own simple one, but I was never fully convinced of the benefit of doing that, though it leads me to believe that good commercial products may not be as plentiful as hoped for.
For the cheapest route, CVS is probably best. There are other GUI solutions available than PCVS, though I haven't tried them out, and I don't know how well they're supported. I presume you've found this page already. A quick perusal and TortoiseCVS seems a fair approximation to what you want (I presume your users are technical enough to use Windows Explorer if they are writing Powerpoint presentations), though their website is down at the moment (perhaps that's a bad sign).
I hope that's of some use to you.
Cheers,
Nixta