On the day that the ASP.NET team announce their new WYSIWYG IDE for Visual Studio Orcas (start downloading that base VPC now), it seems appropriate to have a quick muse about when to talk about new releases of software and their contents. Jeremy Miller started a post series about ‘ilities’ today so I’d put a vote in for a fuller discussion than this on Visibility. Microsoft’s monthly(-ish) CTP releases may be a burden to our phone bills but they also make transparent the direction that the product will go which promotes discussion and sometimes even a change in tack of development. Which is good. Compare and contract Fog Creek software’s reluctance to release details of Fogbugz v6.0 despite some debate on its support forums. Joel Spolsky, the owner of Fog Creek, explains neatly why he prefers less frequent releases and not releasing information about what’s in a new release here, but is a black box approach wise? Ship dates aside, when do you think initial information about a new project or version of a new product should be released?

As a newly paid-up member of the mortgage owner club, my thoughts turn to packing my life up in boxes and making sure everyone knows my new address. Naturally, I try to do as much as possible online. There are some great internet start-ups out there to help the moving process such as helpiammoving.com, iammoving.com and helpineedboxes.co.uk to make the build up to that day somewhat easier, but the general ring around still can’t be avoided and it remains a great frustration when my bank will only change the address on my account if I walk into a branch and fill out a form. More so when the branch then won’t talk to the credit card and pension departments and get them to change my address on their books as well. No, I’ve got to send them each a handwritten letter in the post (not v. secure) to make that change. Considering they were one of the first to allow online banking, it would appear that little has progressed since that launch. The assistant in the branch says everything will be updated for me with one form. Experience says otherwise.

My wife in comparison, who banks elsewhere did all of this in about five minutes online. Sigh. And she’s the luddite.

Despite phoning up well in advance of moving, I still won’t have a phone \ net connection for three weeks either. The previous owners let me know that BT were having to send an engineer out to disconnect them. It looks the same guy will appear again to reconnect me again. Which makes me wonder about broadband sans landline. But I’m in the countryside which nixes that particular idea for wireless broadband (although mynow.co.uk look very good for those who can get it btw), satellite broadband would never cover the cost of installing it and the idea of using NT Hell is quickly dismissed. A 3G card though is an interesting idea provided I’m in a 3G reception area and I can stop myself aimlessly browsing researching stuff online for hours. Nope - guess BT can do what they want. Except send me bills online.

I work in very close proximity to three separate company helpdesks and it strikes me as ironic that while all three can answer near as damn it 100% of our customer queries either on the phone or within an hour of hanging up, our parent company’s IT helpdesk is much more comfortable hiring people who only know how to refer calls to other teams who can actually answer the calls while they remain blissful in their seeming ignorance. I challenged the helpdesk manager about this while querying why one of his team members had never heard of spyware before and got the ‘Too many cooks spoil the broth’ reply. ‘How many cooks are too many’, I wondered before fixing the problem myself.

Who else out there is more than a little concerned when it appears that the technical customer service helpdesk knows less about basic technology than you?