An interesting aside to my other ramblings is that I was curious why my blog postings were being posted with the wrong time. In fact they were saying 8 hours behind which just happens to be the time band I am in at the moment.

As I am in the heart of Microsofts' showcase event so I thought "why not ask the messenger team". Well it turns out that the time is taken from the regional settings for my .NET passport account. "Great solution!"  I stated, and the answer was "it's easy to change your passport settings", not the answer I was hoping for.

Microsoft can make absolutely brilliant tools and products such as MSN Messenger but it's the thinking outside of the box aspect that they appear to sometimes lack.  I speak from other experiences also with this as I have been developing a VSTO (Visual Studio Tools for Office) 2.0 application and other than a few small issues, which the guys on the VSTO team have helped me out with, it hasn't been too bad an experience.  But now it comes to deploy the application and it has become a real headache to the point that we met up with some guys tonight who are involved in an open source project called Wix dedicated to creating installer MSI files.  The stuff these guys are doing should, I feel, be done in-house as it's addressing the problems with deploying modern software. I think on the surface it looks great that Microsoft has all the deployment modellers and setup projects but they need to realise that we don't all deploy to servers In-House and how do we deploy, for example, .NET code access security on every desktop at a customer site.

I still feel very positive about Microsoft as a solution provider but with a conference such as this and so much in-production software on display I cannot help but get the nagging feeling that I hope they actually think about deployment in the real world also.  Lets face it we'd all like to see Installshield get either a sharp kick up the backside or at least enough of a scare to make them think there is an alternative.

While I'm ranting I must also add that I'm a little bit pee'd off that they gave us beta's of Vista but in the form of ISO images on a DVD.  I've got a laptop thats ready to be nuked and I'd have loved to plop the disk in and install it to play with in the breaks but No. I've tried to attach the ISO. I've downloaded extraction tools and finally today I was able to extract it to disk using Win Rar. But wouln't it have been so much easier to give us the thing on a bootable CD is that too much to ask?

Well i'm knackered now so It's off to bed and sleep off tonights Budweiser extravaganza at the Universal Studios.  You got to had it to Bills crowd, they always put on a good show.