On November 10, 1775, an act of the Continental Congress declared "That two Battalions of Marines be raised…". Today they are known as the Marine Corps, and every November 10th the Marine Corps celebrates their Marine birthday with a reading from the Marine Corps manual, a birthday message from the Commandant, and other festivities as well as greetings and good wishes among Marines.
Most Visual Studio developers have not fought on the enemy's battlefield with bullets and blood. For those that have in the 232 years of the Marine Corps, I offer my deepest respect and sincerest appreciation.
On March 19, 1997, Visual Studio 97 was released to the public and thus began a new era of software development. In like manner to the Marines, on this March 19th I would like to wish all of my fellow Visual Studio developers a happy 11th Visual Studio birthday.
Further, I suggest a Visual Studio birthday tradition. First, Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president of the .NET Developer Platform at Microsoft, should deliver a birthday message. Second, we should each read the Visual Studio 97 mission to help remind us of our legacy and what our ambition should be:
In looking to build high-quality tools, Microsoft listened to customers, each clamoring for tighter integration across the myriad of utilities, tools, servers, and platform features they required. Visual Studio 97 enabled development teams to share in large-scale projects across the entire development life cycle, even when mixing components of various languages and using various deployment architectures such as the Internet, Microsoft Windows, and, increasingly, mobile devices.
Happy Birthday!
[Updated: 3/20/2008]
I made a note in the comments, but I wanted to make sure I clarified my post. I am in no way making any sort of comparison between Microsoft and Visual Studio, and the United States Marine Corps. I am also not in any way trying to suggest that software developers do
anything nearly as courageous or selfless as that of the US Marine
Corps. I am simply trying to make reference to the camaraderie of the Marines, and how we might introduce some of their 'community spirit' into our own software development community.