Latest Microsoft Blogs

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...

This morning at 3:17 AM, Mia Yokoyama Haack was born weighing in at 7lb 8.5 oz. Now my world domination crew is complete! Mia is a fast little one as labor started around 11 PM and she was delivered only four hours later! This time around, we did a water birth at a birthing center which involves the momma sitting in a big tub for the last part of labor and delivery, which made for a much more comfortable experience than last time. I think she’d definitely recommend it. We were back home by 6:30 AM which just amazes me. Momma and Baby are doing well. I’m still getting over my cold, but I think the adrenaline of the whole experience helped a lot. :) Read More...

When you visit Norway, it takes a week to recover. Ok, at least when I visit Norway, it takes a week. But that’s just a testament to the good time I had. As they say, what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, but what happens in Oslo gets recorded as a .NET Rocks Live episode . The week before last, I spent the week in Oslo, Norway attending and speaking at the Norwegian Developer’s Conference (NDC 09). This conference was not your typical Microsoft conference I usually attend but was a conference on .NET with a heavy Agile Software bent. Just looking at the speaker line-up will tell you that. Scott Bellware tweeted a blurb recently that succinctly summarized my impression of the conference: how to know you're at a good conference: the speakers...

Being that it’s a glorious Memorial Day Weekend up here in the Northwest, my co-worker Eilon (developer lead for ASP.NET MVC) and I decided to go on a hike to Mt Si where we had a bit of a scary moment. I first learned about Mt Si at the company picnic last year, seen behind me and Cody in this photo. I remember seeing the imposing cliff face and thinking to myself, I want to climb up there . I imagined the view would be quite impressive. Mt Si is a moderately strenuous hike 8 miles round trip with an elevation gain of 3100 feet taking you to about 3600 feet, according to the Washington Trails Association website . Given that it is a very popular hike and that this was a three-day weekend, we figured we’d get an early start by heading over there...

Every good developer knows to always have a backup. For example, over two years ago, I announced my world domination plans . But there was a single point of failure in me putting all my world domination plans on the tiny shoulders of just one progeny. My boy needs a partner in crime. So my wife and I conspired together and we’re happy to announce that baby #2 is on the way. Together, the two of them will be unstoppable! My wife is past her first trimester and we expect the baby to RTF (Release To Family) around October. This second time around has been a bit more challenging. My poor wife, bless her heart, has had to deal with much more sever nausea this time around. Notice the crinkle in the ultrasound photo. My son did that. ;) He's trying...

The third and last day of ALT.NET Seattle was a short one for me. My poor extremely patient wife was not feeling well today so I had to leave right at lunch time. But before I left, I did manage to attend a great session by John Lam and Jimmy Schementi on “Adding Scripting Support to .NET Applications”. In fact, you can watch the session here via Kyte.tv . John and Jimmy covered the topic of hosting IronRuby to provide “end-user” ability to script an application. The classic example is that many 3-D games, Half-Life for example, write their core 3-D engines etc… in C++. However, they often provide a scripting language such as LUA which allows others to script the behavior of objects in the game, as these types of things change often and you...

Day two of ALT.NET is over and I’m already pooped (for you non-English speakers, that means tired, not something else that might come to mind). Once again, photos by our Chronicler, Brad Wilson . As a testament to how engaging the sessions were, there are a lot fewer photos from day two in his photostream . The first session I went to was on the topic of Encouraging Open Source in the .NET Space as seen above, which veered all over the place. Many felt the industry is shifting towards more and more Open Source software so those who can leverage that will be better off than those who can. One interesting idea that came out of it was there’s a need for more education regarding Open Source. For example, understanding licensing is very challenging...

Day one of the ALT.NET Seattle conference is over and I’m looking forward to tomorrow’s sessions. As an Open Spaces event, the first order of business was for us, the attendees, to set the session agenda for the rest of the conference. In the above photo, you can see Scott Hanselman proposing a topic in one of my favorite conference photos taken by Brad Wilson . This process took about two hours after which many of us headed out to Red Robin for a nerd dinner. This is my second ALT.NET Open Spaces event and I really like the principles set forth: Whoever comes is the right people Whatever happens is the only thing that could have happened Whenever it starts is the right time When it's over, it's over In some ways, it reminds me of the...

At the end of the year, it’s very common for bloggers to take a look back at their own blog and list their favorite 10 blog posts. I find that somewhat narcissistic, so you know I’m going to do that. But before I do, I thought it would be great to list the top 10 blog posts by others I read in 2008. The only problem is, I have very bad short-term memory and I can’t seem to remember which ones I read that had a real impact on my thinking. I’ll have to try and keep better track in 2009. So based on a cursory Google search and look through my Google Reader app, here are some of my favorite blog posts of 2008 by you all, I couldn’t even list 10. Please do comment with your own favorite blog posts, mine or otherwise of 2008. Favorite Posts I Read...

Ever since I first started using FeedBurner , I was very happy with the service. It was exactly the type of service I like, fire and forget and it just worked. My bandwidth usage went down and I gained access to a lot of interesting stats about my feed. When I was first considering it, others warned me about losing control over my RSS feed. That led me to pay for the MyBrand PRO feature which enabled me to burn my feed using my own domain name at http://feeds.haacked.com/haacked by simply creating a CNAME from feeds.haacked.com to feeds.feedburner.com . The idea was that if I ever wanted to reclaim my feed because something happened to FeedBurner or because I simply wanted to change, I could simply remove the CNAME and serve up my feed itself...