Latest Microsoft Blogs

Stumbling around the net, I ran into the “funny verticals” meme. These are typically a vertical strip of screenshots pulled from a movie or television with funny captions tacked on. If you do an image search for “ funny verticals ”, you’ll see a whole slew of them. Be forewarned, there are some very crude and offensive ones. For the lazy, here are a few representative ones I found to be funny. The first example is from the movie Inception: This is another one from Inception. There seems to be a lot using this specific sequence. And here’s one from the television show, LOST. On a lark, I thought it’d be funny to try and do a geek version of this meme. I chose two personalities in our community I figured would be very well known, Scott Hanselman...

It’s that time of year at Microsoft when managers are busily preparing reviews of their reports and preparing for the big stack ranking . Yesterday, my manager sent out an email asking his reports to email him with their accomplishments in the past year to help jog his memory. This arms him with important information when he goes to the matt for us arguing why we’re more deserving of a higher ranking than some other manager’s sad report. Here was my response. In the past year, I… Escaped from a black hole. Twice. I forgot my jacket in there and had to go get it. Discovered an albino polar bear. Proved Fermat’s Last Theorem as well as his penultimate theorem. Found Waldo. And made him change out of that ridiculous shirt and hat. Discovered he...

Dear Reader, I apologize for not blogging much lately. I know, total #fail, but I’ve been so f***ing busy lately. I thought I would start off this new year right with a top ten list FTW! Without further ado, I present my list of the top 10 blogging clichés of 2010. These are things yours truly would never ever do, right? The random photo: Starting off the list is a very common one that even gets the very best bloggers, including a random photo in the blog post completely irrelevant to the topic at hand as if trying to meet a stock photography quota for the month. Perhaps you own stock in the stock xchng (or perhaps I should!). At least try to make the photo slightly relevant so it adds something to the post. “Dear Reader”: Is there a more patronizingly...

Our eye in the sky reports two angry evil (but devishly good looking) cyborg units, XSP 2000 and TRS-80, are fast approaching Black Rock City. They are considered very armed and dangerous. In fact, they are mostly armed and not much else. These cyborgs do not come in peace. I repeat, they are to be considerd hostiles. However, we’ve received a secret communiqué that reveals a weakness built into these cyborg models. Due to a lack of TDD during development, a bug in their FOF system (friend or foe) causes them to view anyone offering a frosty beverage to be a friend, not foe. Any attempts to engage with these hostiles will result in calamity unless you offer them an ice cold beverage. For the sake of your beloved city, I suggest stocking up....

The “copyleft” provisions of the GPL ( GNU General Public License ) require that any changes or additions to a GPL licensed work must itself be licensed under terms that adhere to the GPL. Critics of these “copyleft” provisions have derogatively labeled the GPL as a “viral” license. Such criticism points out that any code that seeks to incorporate GPL licensed code must itself adhere to the terms of the GPL, thus potentially “infecting” other code with its restrictions. This has caused many developers of proprietary systems to be concerned about any usage of GPL code within their products for fear of turning their closed source codebase into a GPL licensed open source codebase. But now there’s a new viral license to be feared. This new license...

Despite what your well intentioned elementary school teachers would have liked you to believe, there is such a thing as a stupid question , and you probably get them all the time via email or IM. You also know that in half the time it takes to type the question, the person pestering you could have typed the query in their favorite search engine and received an answer immediately. Let me Google that for you addressed this little annoyance by providing a passive aggressive means to tell annoying question askers to bugger off while at the same time teaching them the power of using a search engine to help themselves. When I first heard about the Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing , I jumped at purchasing the domain name http://letmebingthatforyou...

My last post on the new dynamic keyword sparked a range of reactions which are not uncommon when discussing a new language keyword or feature. Many are excited by it, but there are those who feel a sense of…well…grief when their language is “marred” by a new keyword. C#, for example, has seen it with the var keyword and now with the dynamic keyword. I don’t know, maybe there’s something to this idea that developers go through the seven stages of grief when their favorite programming language adds new stuff ( Disclaimer: Actually, I’m totally making this crap up ) 1. Shock and denial. With the introduction of a new keyword, initial reactions include shock and denial. No way are they adding lambdas to the language! I had a hard enough time with...

Ok, I haven’t had a good track record with making up jokes before. Just see exhibit A - this groaner of an MVC joke . However, I think I did okay recently with a few geeky Your Momma jokes that I can’t just leave to Twitter alone. Here they are: Your momma so fat, Bloatware is her clothing line. Your momma so fat I called her and got a stack overflow. your momma so ugly its just best to forego the "V" in MVC with her. So now it’s your turn. Please post your best ones in the comments to this post. :) Technorati Tags: humor , jokes , your momma jokes Read More...

During my talk at the PDC, I heeded Hanselman’s call to action and decided to veer away from the Northwind “Permademo” and build something different. In the middle of the talk, I unveiled that I was going to build a competitor to StackOverflow which I would call HaackOverflow. This was all news to Jeff as he hadn’t seen the demo until that point. The demo walked through some basics of building a standards based ASP.NET MVC application, and sprinkled in a bit of AJAX. At the very end, I swapped out the site.css file and added an image and changed the site from the drab default blue template to something that looked similar in spirit to StackOverflow. If you haven’t seen the talk yet, you can watch it on Channel9 . Also, the links to my slides...

…and the feeling’s right. If I can muster up the time and motivation, I like to try and post lighter more humorous fare on Fridays such as my recent RAS Syndrome post . On this beautiful Friday day (is that redundant too?), I started off fresh out of ideas (and motivation) so I wasn’t planning on writing a blog post at all, until this was just handed to me. Which Software Blogger Do Girls Like Better? In this post, Nick Berardi takes a quick look around at the demographic information collected by Google’s new ad planner . Consider for a moment, what this data represents. It is a huge database of information on surfing habits of perhaps nearly the entire Internet, collected via huge data centers consisting of unfathomable computing power (as...