Latest Microsoft Blogs

No, I’m not talking about my mental age. My son turned four this past week which means I’m four years into my world domination plan . One of the gifts we gave my son was a toolbox with plastic toys so we can train him on building the mega-lasers and fortresses needed to take over the world. Turns out that before you start dominating the world, you have to start taking baby steps. And then toddler steps. And then 4-year old running terror steps. In these past four years, I’ve learned a lot. For example, you can get a four year old to believe anything. That’s come in useful as a tool for manipulating my child to do my bidding. We were at the mall one day and he asked about a picture of a zombie with rotting teeth and without skipping a beat, my...

At some point, everybody and every team makes a mistake they regret and wish they could take back. During our regular status meetings, I sometimes make the mistake of saying something like “if I could go back in time, I’d tell myself not to make that decision.” Image from the greenhead . That tees it up for our lead developer who’s so smart even his ass is smart. You might say he’s a smart ass. His response is usually “Really? I can think of a lot better things I would do with a time machine.” Which got me thinking. Hypothetically speaking of course, if I did have a time machine, how exactly would I maximize my profit? Often, time travel questions fixate on boring topics such as if you could meet anyone in history, who would it be? Lincoln?...

I recently finished reading Accelerando by Charles Stross and I thought it was a great book… it does exactly what I want from a future-focused science fiction book… it takes plausible advances from today and takes them to their logical extremes.  Bing tells me that “accelerando” means “it indicates a gradual increase in tempo, or pace” which, in this context I think refers to the increasing in technical progress over the years the book covers.  Stross starts with some very simple suppositions about future advances that are not a far cry from where we are today: personal devices will help us remember more things and even offload some of our thinking.  We will interact with them  using outputs such as video glasses and inputs...

I have started teaching my 6-year old son logo as our summer learning project.  My goal is to help him discover the creativity and logical thinking approach that programming requires. And, of course to share a passion that I have with him, so there is a tiny hope we will have something to talk about when he is a teenager. ;-) Anyway, tonight he just finished his ‘real’  first program!  A bit of it was copied from an example and some of it was inspired from watching me play around, but really it was all his idea.    Oh, and you Framework Design Guidelines fans – don’t worry, names like “tri” and “wee” will not last.. what is the naming conventions for Logo anyway?  (btw, “wee” is short for pinwheel and tri of course...

I just finished up Outliers: The Story of Success tonight….  Gladwell is a masterful story teller.  You can not walk away from this book without thinking about the world differently.  Rather than seeing success as a "lucky-break” or simply hard work, you realize the truly noteworthy success is a product of history and community, of opportunity and desire.  In the large, the book made me consider our social trends and what long term, multi-generational effects they are bound to have.   In the small the book spurred many conversations between my wife on how to give our kids the best opportunities.  Enjoy! Read More...

Today is office move day across much of .NET Framework land.. Good folks across building 41 and 42 are doing a little shuffling around… As part of the move, we all had to be out of the office today. Like any good manager, I wanted to keep my team productive even during this “downtime”.. Many of engineers on the team wanted to work on “their” machines, so we reserved a conference room and had them plug in their machines there then go home or to Starbucks or the local library and work from there remotely. So we ended up with a conference room full of nearly identical headless dev machines, luckily we had the foresight to label them.. all but one of them ;-) All was going well until machine “Enso01” needed to be rebooted. This is our test pass...

I am ready to replace my several year old Verizon XV6700… The 2 nd replacement battery is not keeping me through the day any more, it is way too heavy and my colleagues pick on my for using such old technology ;-) I have a pretty good deal with Verizon, so I’d like to say with them if possible… The killer apps for me today are calendaring and basic email… but I’d love to use the phone as an MP3 player and GPS seems very sexy… I also really like to be able to use my phone as a modem for my laptop… Do you have a mobile phone you love? What do you think I should get\avoid? Should I try to tough it out until after the holidays? Thanks! Read More...

While I was out in the bush near Krueger national park in South Africa recently I found a great use for Live Mesh ...  After a full day of seeing some excellent big game I had a ton of photos to show for my effort. Later that night, back in the lodge, I was briefly able to get on the spotty, very low bandwidth wireless network to work for me.  So I shared my pictures using live mesh and immediately shared getting a cloud hosted backup of my precious photos.   As they were uploading I was thinking about how much I wanted to share this experience with my wife and kids who where half a world away and fast asleep.  I thought it would be fun to make the kitchen laptop display my latest pictures.  So I "connected"...

When I was working the update for my Ajax demo , I needed to create thumb nail from a director of photos.  There are tons of tools out there to do this, but I thought I'd share the very simple code I used.  It takes all the jpgs in the root path and creates 160x120 thumbnails of them. It also copies the original photo into fullpath.    namespace ThumbNailer { class Program { static void Main( string [] args) { string rootPath = @"C:\Users\brada\Desktop\ForDemo" ; string thumbPath = Path .Combine(rootPath, "Thumb" ); if ( Directory .Exists(thumbPath)) DirectoryDelete(thumbPath); Directory .CreateDirectory(thumbPath); int imageNumber = 0; foreach ( string s in Directory .GetFiles(rootPath, "*.jpg"...

I have a theory that you can't build amazingly great products if you don't deeply know the customer. An d the best way to get the visceral and lasting impression is to physically go see the customer work in their own environment. This where I need your help. I am looking to get smarter about the way custom application development in small business really works. While Microsoft has some great feedback channels for large ISVs and large business. The small business is a slightly harder area for us because of its breath. My, somewhat crazy, idea is to get folks from my team physically outside of the Microsoft campus and get a first hand experience of what life is like for folks doing custom application development in small businesses. To make the...