I do lots of SharePoint development, and the standard Windows tools really rub me the wrong way.

I'd like to do all of my development in emacs, and remotely run msbuild and deployments on the vm via cygwin's ssh, but I don't know enough about msbuild and sharepoint to know how to make that happen.

Has anyone done this, or knows someone who has done this, or can point me to more information along these lines?

I just tried to install netcat on cygwin so I could diagnose the flaky network connectivity of the VMWare virtual machine, but Symantec says it's an unacceptable risk, it could be used to get around restrictions, so I am not allowed access to this file.

Yes, I seriously heard all this in the past fifteen minutes. I have a morbid fascination with corporate double speak. Can you furnish any famous phrases that I've missed? Or possibly point me to a collection of double speak that I could use to subtly poke fun at people in meetings?

My personal favorite is at the end.

• knock it out of the park


• leverage your brand


• tie strategies around it


• missed the boat


• We'll document the lessons learned.


• We've gotten critical feedback.


• Here's our current collateral.


• Here's our current bible.


• Being the lean folks.


• I'll test the water.


• I don't think our ducks are in a row from a deployment standpoint.


• I want what you're telling us we should have.


• They're up, using $SOFTWARE, and it shows deployment and adoption.


• What I don't want to do is air dirty laundry.


• You're too worried about perfection and transparency would be better.


• Get it out there, share it. The more people who can see you the more who can help you.


• $DEPARTMENT wants to shut us down.


• We're starting to take that over and implement on it.


• When you're dealing with the implementation instead of the politics, it's a lot nicer.


• What's the adoption rate? Where are we going with it? What's our architectural roadmap?


• I want to make sure we're not walking into a lion's den with steak necklaces.


• Losing the connection back to what your business actually needs to get done.


• I've scoped out some suitably specific targets.


• Thinking, rethinking, double checking, double thinking.

I found this today: Why you need a degree to work for BigCo by Reg Braithwaite.

This article covers my thoughts on working for Raytheon, better than I could do myself.

Clearly I'm doing the wrong thing with my life.

If a manager asks you to talk to him, and asks "What happened on this project?" they don't actually want you to point out how the system is broken, and how it could be fixed, they are actually saying "Do you have any excuses for screwing this up?" (even if you had nothing to do with anything screwing up) and "Are you going to live up to our Death March expectations?" (is there ever a good answer for that one?)

If you respond to such a question with "I think we underestimated the amount of time this project would take." That will not be perceived as "You guys set this up to fail from the beginning, " instead your statement will come across as You, the person speaking, cannot estimate effectively. In corporate space, no one can hear you point out the flaws in their system, the things you say instead reflect on your perceived inability to get things done.

Developing on a Virtual Machine is painfully slow, even though VMWare feels faster than Virtual PC.
Maybe it's the fact that I'm running windows server something on top of windows xp, but I would really like to find something faster.

Dear LazyWeb,
Is there a minimal Linux CD/DVD 64-bit boot image that is designed to run VMWare images with great efficiency as well as allowing me to address all 4GB of memory?
Or maybe there's a HOWTO somewhere that shows how to build such an image for myself?

What n00b used completely different syntax for the two SQL operations that map values onto columns?

Update is:

UPDATE T SET C1 = 1, C2 = 2;

Insert is:

INSERT INTO T (C1, C2) VALUES (1, 2);

Would it not have made more sense to use the same flavor of mapping so that parsing and generating SQL would be easier?

Dear LazyWeb, is there any good reason for this inconsistency?

Today I learned that I have to get approval/permission to install software that did not come with my work laptop.
So I wrote up a short list:

• Emacs 23.0.60.1 / EmacsW32 1.58, everyone's favorite open source editor.
  
• 7-zip, a compression utility.
  
• Chandler, a PIM written in Python.
  
• GHC, the Haskell compiler.
  
• GIMP, an open source Photoshop replacement.
  
• Google Chrome, a recently released browser
  
• GTK+ Runtime (for the GIMP and other Linuxy tools)
  
• Pidgin, an IM client
  
• Poderosa, a command line wrapper application.
  
• PuTTY, an ssh client
  
• Python 2.5 for MoinMoin, the local wiki I use. (and for Chandler, the GIMP, etc)
  
• Subversion and the TortoiseSVN client (I bought myself a Win32/Visual Studio license recently).
  
• Winamp
  
• WinRar
  
• XEmacs 21.4.21 (for those days when Gnu Emacs just can't handle it)
  
• Cygwin, a thin layer on top of Windows that acts like a genuine Linux.
  

So my questions to the LazyWeb are... what essential Linuxy utilities am I missing?

And, do you have to get all your software approved at your job?

Also, if I am not allowed to use Cygwin and Emacs on my Windows laptop, how will I save my sanity?

The best image editor for Windows is obviously... the GIMP, aka the Gnu Image Manipulation Program.
I'm doing web design this week at work, and one of the stock images I was told to use has an ugly flaw. In the original discussion my boss told me we had a current copy of Photoshop hanging around unused after the departure of the previous graphics guy.
So I tried to get hold of this copy of Photoshop on Monday, now it's Thursday and still no one knows where the media or license key is hiding.
The ops guys said they don't manage software for our group, the dev guys have no clue where it might be. So I gave in and installed the GIMP for windows. Now the image is cleaned up, and I don't have to fight the bureaucracy.

Every time I go home and hack some fun Haskell, the next day at work my C# code has bugs that show my purely functional bias.

Dear Lazyweb, does this happen to you too?