Don’t believe the hype John.   I understand and empathize with a number of your complaints about CSS but as anyone who has been in the IT field for any length of time will tell you, reality rarely if ever matches the hype.  Hyping is part of the business but we as users/consumers/developers (pick any) at this stage in the game should know better than to swallow the hook.

CSS is a standard written by the W3C for to help with the layout of web sites and applications.  I look at the use of CSS for web development like delivering a ham sandwich to a starving man.  No, it’s not a nourishing meal but it’s a damn sight better than what
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An Open Letter to Microsoft

Stop! Please stop!  Put the keyboard down and step away from the desk.

Your development tools are great.  They’re easy to pick up, easy to work with and we have built some very cool applications and sites with them.  No complaints there.  However…

We have been Certified Partners with you for over 3 years, and in that time you have foisted no less than three different account management Web site versions upon us.  We don’t make many changes to our account, so I don’t go into the Partner web site very often. But I can tell you that when I do, I’m not interested in a treasure hunt.  Throw me a bone here.  Can you keep the same site up for maybe 2 years in a row? 

This year’s change was the worst, as it occurred during our renewal period  - and your site was down for days, to add insult to injury.  Now I’ve got to go in and
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With the release of Microsoft SQL Server 2005 and Visual Studio 2005, we’ll be getting some interesting new tools for application development.  The most interesting of these from my point of view will be the tight integration between the two with the use of the common language runtime and the flexibility that should be provided.  We’ll just have to see how much promise has actually made it into final product.

By and large we don’t tend to do much with betas and will wait until production quality product is released.  There aren’t enough hours in the day or projects to experiment with to justify spending much time with stuff that won’t be ready for sometimes years into the future.

Based on the successes we’ve had with SQL Server 2000 and Visual Studio
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