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My cell phone contract expires in a couple weeks and I was all set to buy an iPhone. The iPhone had started to take off when I got my current phone / contract but at that the time Microsoft paid for a significant portion of my phone bill so staying with a Windows powered phone was appropriate (I like to be a good team player.) Budget tightening as changed the expense policy and now Microsoft’s contribution to my cell phone expenses is limited to $35. So, I figured I’d get an iPhone, it’s what all the cool geeks have. Plus, my Windows phone from T-Mobile is falling apart, which matters little since it’s never really worded all that well any way. Windows Mobile 6 wasn’t a real home run in comparison. There have been a number of reasons...
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A few years back I wrote a post on the size of the .NET Framework . There's historically been a lot of confusion on the site of the .NET Framework. If you search around on the web for ".NET Framework" or ".NET Framework Redistributable" you'll often get a link to a 200 meg download. That download is the complete offline thing that developers redistribute when they want to install the .NET Framework on any kind of machine without an internet connection. The .NET 3.5 Client Profile is more like 28 megs and the .NET 4 Client Profile is a looking smaller that than, in fact. Back then I made this website, SmallestDotNet.com to help out. It'll sniff your browser's UserAgent and tell you want version of .NET you...
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I did a second .NET Framework features informal poll recently , and as with all .NET related polls the question comes up: How many PCs have the .NET Framework on it? If you're a company that is considering creating a client application using .NET (not Silverlight, but the .NET Framework) you'd probably like to know if your end-user needs to install something extra to use your app. So I started asking questions. We've said things here and there about the pervasiveness of the .NET Framework but I wanted to get the final word (at the time of this writing) and put it somewhere easy to fine. After some digging, here's what I've got: Well over 90% of the PCs in the world have some version of the .NET Framework installed. Over 65...
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The folks in the .NET Framework Setup team have a favor to ask, and it's pretty cool info so I offered to help. Here's the deal. When .NET 4 releases, the .NET 4 Client Profile will be released as a recommended update on Windows Update (WU) for Vista and Windows 7. It'll be listed as optional on Windows XP. They need help testing the WU parts. You may have heard, but the .NET 4 Client Profile size is WAY smaller than before. There's been lots of cool improvements since the .NET 3.5 Client Profile . For example, on Window XP the download for .NET 4 Client is just ~28Mb for machines with no framework. .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 Client Profile .NET Framework 4 Client Profile Web install only Local package and Web install. Only Windows...
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While I (really) unplugged in December of 2009, you can access a nice calendar of all my 2009 posts (as well as other years) at this link . In 2008 I published a Greatest Hits post that I will keep updated, but here's a list of links to the posts I most enjoyed writing this last year. I hope you find some of them useful, and perhaps you missed one or two or you just started reading recently and this 2009 "Greatest Hits" Post will catch you up on the stuff I was thinking about this year. General Geekery Painful Reminder: Focus on Core Competencies (and Back Stuff Up) 10 Awesome Things I Remember About Computers FizzBin - The Technical Support Secret Handshake Paving my machine for a fresh 2009 - First-Pass Must-Haves Low Bandwidth...
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Just about two years ago I joined Microsoft . I'm fortunate to work in a home office with a great team that I now lead . We work for the group at Microsoft that runs MSDN , TechNet , ASP.NET , Silverlight.NET , WindowsClient.NET , basically all the online education stuff. The giant group is called STO (Server & Tools Online) and our little group is " stoninja ." That's our internal mailing alias. We create content for all of the sites above but we're also active members of the community. We listen and drive feedback back into the product group. We're not part of the product evangelism group (DPE - Developer Platform Evangelism), but rather we focus primarily on online content creation. I like to think that we're...
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Lots of big stuff happening this week. Today Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 is available to MSDN Subscribers and it'll be available for everyone on Wednesday. I'm running Beta 2 on all my machines now and really digging it. It's much faster than Beta 1 and I'm doing all my work in it now. It's come a long way and I'm really impressed at the polish. .NET 4 This is a big deal. This isn't ".NET 3.6" - there are a lot of improvements of .NET 4, and it's not just "pile on a bunch of features so you get overwhelmed." I've been working with and talking to many of the teams involved and even though it's a cheesy thing to say, this is a really customer-focused release. Shouldn't every release...
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The team I work for is called Server and Tools Online. If you go way, way up, our boss is Soma ( Yes, this Soma ), but down here in the trenches there's the folks that make content and systems to help you after you "File | New Project." Our goals this year are to get back to basics and make sure that our online user experience meets these goals in as few clicks as possible. A few months ago I snuck a few "comps" out of a meeting with the designers on MSDN . A few months before that we talked about the a upcoming "loband" option for MSDN and performance improvements to the MSDN library that are bringing page-load times for the MSDN library to the 1- and 2-second level. There was a lot of great comments and feedback...
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If you answered “Yes” then it might be interesting to you that there is an opportunity on our team for a person who has passion for making web development easier and exciting for everyone… This job posting is the unofficial job posting describing a person whom I am looking to refer to my team to consider for an official job posting which exists somewhere on Microsoft.com… :-) Our team is chartered with building Web Developer Tools based on web standards and so we are looking for someone who knows HTML, CSS, JavaScript/AJAX… We would love if this person knows PHP and/or ASP.NET too… If you know someone who loves building Web Sites and is passionate about web development technologies then please pass on the word… The person will most likely...
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Cross-browser testing is a hassle. Most of the time you can follow standards and get a decent looking website working cross browser, but there's always variations. All browsers have their quirks and older IEs have more than their fair share. As I see it, there's basically three main pillars of cross-browser testing: Pros Cons Breadth ScreenShot Service Gets you screenshots of your site on a million browsers and platforms No interaction with the browsers, no way to debug interactions. Depth - Interaction Virtual Machines You really get to see how your site looks and works on many browsers. You have to maintain a bunch of Virtual Machines, or a be aware lot of browser installations. Depth - Look and Feel SuperPreview Lets you see...
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