but the patient just keeps growing and growing!

Got my May/June copy of CoDe today. Full of good information and interesting stuff, as usual.

But I guess the editorial set my thinking on a certain path...

Here we had the Editor in Chief (Editor-in-Chief if you prefer) recounting how "defining this platform was actually the easy part. The challenging part has been in selecting the parts of VS.NET/SQL Server platform appropriate for their development team.".
I guess the "defining part was 'use .NET with SQL Server'. Boy, I hope that was easy! But the challenging part, well all I can say is that *if* .NET is soooo complicated (include component counts and component intracies in that, please) that it's truly hard to decide, then I'd say 'Houston we have a problem'! And, by the way, since when was a new platform (i.e. its pieces) chosen based on its appropriateness to the (existing) development team???

This kind of talk, once the domain of the mainframers, was exactly what fostered the unprecedented growth of the PC market in the first place. Now MS is turning us all into the problem!

Deeper in to the magazine, I couldn't help but notice that many of the contributors proudly proclaim that they are members of the "INETA Speaker's Bureau". You know, that "user group" that has Microsoft and MSDN as "charter sponsors".

I also observed that one of the contributors has "over 15 years of experience in architecting, designing and developing successful .NET applications." (bolding mine). Should have mentioned 'experienced time traveller' as a major qualification too, since visiting the future is about the only way to gain that experience.

Finally, there's that omnipresent column "Ask the Doc Detective". Been there since I became a CoDe reader. I would have thought that by now this would be an embarrassment to .NET and its gliterati and that the resources required would have been poured into the .NET documentation to make such a column disappear. But it's still here, with as many questions as ever! They can make .NET really really clever but they can't address a simple issue like documentation content, consistency, accuracy or EASE OF USE. That might be an OK situation for the "early adopters" but I don't know how that's going to wash with the masses. On the other hand, that's a sure way to require expensive consultants to come in and 'help' get things done. Just like the mainframe days!

Killing the golden goose or creating the golden archaeopteryx?