skizz.biz

Finding things on Microsoft’s site is an exercise in frustration.

Here is a case in point. I am looking for a fix to a problem caused when trying to open a VSTO (Office) project in Visual Studio. I get a helpful error that says “The project type is not supported by this installation.”. There are a few places around the web that talk of this problem and suggest ways to fix it. I follow one link to an MS web page:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=A2151993-991D-4F58-A707-5883FF4C1DC2&displaylang=en

Unfortunately this is an old link, and the page no longer exists. MS use their flagship Live Search to give me a set of alternatives. Unfortunately, and insanely stupidly, the very first link that comes up as a result of the search is the same link that I was trying to go to in the first place — the one that doesn’t exist.

Sigh.

Interestingly when I put the same search into Google and follow the link, I get the same ‘not found’ error but the first link on the page is not the recursive search link.

I was showing http://cuil.com to a colleague — I like the three column view — when I noticed this rather unexpected image appear when I did a search for Martin Fowler : http://www.cuil.com/search?q=martin+fowler

So who is that youngster that appears? Did Martin clone himself a few years back and is starting to accustom us to his new younger avatar?

The photo does not appear on the linked page that I can see, and the image link itself (http://www.cuilimg.com/imgsrv?i=020410:620124592474843) doesn’t help. But there is a clue in the categories on the right hand side :

So here is the solution - it seems that Martin has actually been a fictional character all along, and indeed Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture itself is a subtle astroturfing campaign to add credibility to a character in an english soap opera.

Who knew? :-)