Restoring the trust between agile and software craftsmanship

Andy Hunt (@PragmaticAndy) 2/7/11 4:36 PM Uncle Bob talks about the agile manifesto and craftsmanship movementshttp://bit.ly/g9jdHH

Microsoft MIX : Why can’t they offer RSS Feed instead?

I don’t know why? Majority of conferences organized by and around Microsoft Technologies, DO NOT offer RSS Feeds of their sessions and videos. For some mysterious reasons. Instead the sites offer a ridiculously tedious and stupid interface to subscribe/download session videos.

It is supposedly a conference of UX Experts.

“MIX is a gathering of developers, designers, UX experts and business professionals creating the most innovative and profitable consumer sites on the web.” - http://live.visitmix.com/

But when you want to watch or download session videos, there is NO RSS FEED. Instead here is what they want you to do:

If you’d like to download all of the keynote and session content, download a recent build of cURL (~250K), and extract it to your folder-of-choice. Then, download MIX10Downloader.zip (1.39KB) and extract the MIX10Downloader.bat file to the same folder. From a command prompt, start MIX10Downloader by passing it one of the following parameters: WMVHIGH, WMV, MP4, PPTX. Then wait. For files that aren’t available, cURL will download a file that is around 1,245 bytes in size (if you change the extension to .htm and open it, you’ll see that the file is simply an HTML "not found" error page).

To rename the files, first, download MIX10Renamer.zip (4.09KB). Then, extract the MIX10Renamer.bat file to the folder that contains your downloaded files, and from a command prompt, type MIX10Renamer WMV to rename all of the .WMV files to the full session title. By changing the parameter, you can also rename your PPTX and MP4 files.

Majority of people that are interested in these sessions, I believe, would have one or other RSS Feed Reader applications. If they provide an RSS FEED, everybody can easily and readily view all sessions and download if they want to.

What kind of an UX is this?