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If you think you don't have a life – working hard hours on code, spending your free time on open source projects – you need to take a look at the LineRider phenomena and rethink that.
LineRider (beta!) is flash game, or to follow its inventor more accurately, a flash toy where you draw the two dimensional course for a cute bobsledder. Complete with an amusing implementation gravity and inertia it's a fun way to waste a few minutes online.
Unless, of course, you're insane. You're welcome to go to the LineRider Squidoo Lens to browse through some of the most disturbingly elaborate skiing courses ever built for LineRider. These guys spend what must amount to weeks, if not months, of their time to build ingenious courses that will leave you in awe.
A truly humbling display of when wasting time becomes true art.
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In a recent post, Leon Langleyben described a Team Foundation Source Control "feature" that is giving users a hard time. The "feature" is that the Check Out command in TFSC no longer performs a Get Latest on the file checked out, as we were accustomed to in VSS.
In the older Visual SourceSafe, when you checked out a file VSS would get the latest version of the file to your local machine and only then open the file for you to work on. This is critical when working in Exclusive Checkout Mode, which is the most popular work mode in VSS. It guarantees that whoever starts working on the file picks up from the point his predecessor finished and not from some undetermined version in the past.
Having removed the implicit Get Latest operation from the Check Out command Microsoft has yet again shot itself in the foot by shooting its users in the stomach. Teams migrating to TFSC from VSS are taken completely by surprise by the fact that when a team member checks a file out he is not guaranteed to work on the latest version.
Most programmers I've talked this over with describe this new "feature" as a bug. It completely breaks their faith in TFSC as a reliable source control system. When basic trust in it is shattered, TFSC has very little chance of being accepted as the better successor of VSS. My team won't even consider the transition in light of the difficulties one of our team leaders experienced with TFSC in a different company.
How could the TFSC development team make such a terrible mistake? - A harsh usability error that impacts drastically on the marketability of their product. I believe that this happened because the TFSC development team was focused on cutting edge source control strategies and neglected to remember that most of their users are still fixated on the traditional Exclusive Check Out strategy.
Leon describes this as "one of VSTS source control features that is hard to explain to clients". This implies clients are thick headed and I don't think this is the case. I think Microsoft broke the client's expectations without proper warning and needs to fix things ASAP.
I am thankful that the TFSC development team has taken measures to remedy the situation in the next version by adding a "Get Latest on Checkout" command to the system.