This is an expression used by developers and managers within Microsoft to live by the software that they develop. This isn't a bad idea, but the food they eat is usually fresh and right out of the kitchen. While this mindset helps in delivering stable products to the customer, it unfortunately doesn't go very far in catching the more subtle errors that occur after prolonged or unexpected patterns of usage.
Since I'm a hard-core technology junkie, I'd be eager to switch to this new diet, but, unfortunately as a consultant in the real world, I see very few companies who are eager to adopt the latest and greatest every time a new 'must have' product comes out. Because of that, I'm usually the one left behind to find work arounds and document bugs that, if I'm lucky, might be fixed in a future version of the product I'm using. With Visual Studio .NET in particular, it's given me a unique role as a 'goto guy' within the companies I work at because of the knowledge and experience that I've earned through deploying real-world applications .NET-based applications.
Should I thank Microsoft for this unique position? Well, I think the jury is still out on that question. But it has given me the opportunity to really dig into the framework and IDE and gain a deep understanding of some of the best ways to take advantage of this new platform. I've been working with .NET since the early beta days through Microsoft's Early Adopters program for Visual Studio .NET and also a few other related beta programs. I hope that the experiences I can share with you will help make your own journey through .NET a little more productive and interesting. Thanks for reading my blog!