ASP.net Preview Building 20 Scams
Prior to Beta1 the ASP.net team invited me and 20 people I choose to a Seattle Building 20 Design Preview to see Beta1 ASP.net and supply our input. Rob Scoble wrote a very incorrect rah-rah building 20 commentary based on a hall chat with the people who run it.
I have made 3 trips to building 20 with 20-40 invitees I choose personally. I refused to attend the fourth one I was invited for these reasons:
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The Design reviews are misnamed - they are sessions where the ASP.net team over-promises (turning the naive into unpaid evangelists or wannabee employees) and years later when shipping, under delivers.
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The ASP.net team implements nothing suggested at Building 20 design reviews, but if the reviews help them find bugs or flaws they act as if fixing those is big favor.
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Design Reviews are in effect a waste of a trip (we paid flight and hotel to Seattle, not MicroSoft Scoble is just wrong about that) since no suggestions appear in product unless they already planned it or it can be done in 10 minutes.
It does however get MS new envangelists free among the naieve who think their input is taken, but those naive types do not follow up and realize their design input never appears - they are too starstruck by the MS employees to be rational and cognizant. Sample broken promises from my 1.0 pre-Beta 1 review include
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XHTML support
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a Web.Config editor from the team
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XML comments for VB.net in a minor 1.0 service pack (we still won't have those for 12+ more months till 2.0)
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many broken WebMatrix promises. The WebMatrix Design Preview (called Project Saturn at that time) -- we were promised frequent updates (many times a month) and to be a true Open Source project with non-MS participation in checking in code.
Dozen of Building 20 design review promises were broken. I and others made dozens of suggestions many of which won't even make it into 2.0 even muc hless the promise that we could mold 1.0 if we paid our own way to Seattle.
The Building 20 design reviews were also used to pressure us into signing very restrictive contracts to be GotDot Net Codewise Community linked - no contract no link, no featured site status ever I always thought comunity was about friendly links not contracts & censorship.
Building 20 design reviews were also where Alan Kipman tried hard to force me to do 100+ hours of work for FREE on code name "lighthouse" project with a strong promise to ship as part of Vstudio service pack within 4 months (2+ years later "lighthouse" has not shipped). I was chastized strongly for refusal to devote 100 hours doing that and also for not donating my time to tie Lyris AspFriends into the forums (for $0).
So save the money and several days spent on Design Previews in Building 20 and join a SourceForge project where you can really affect the code and product. I did that with RainbowPortal and enjoyed that mty input made it into the next release candidate within weeks.