Latest Microsoft Blogs : Random

Science Fiction Book Review: Accelerando by Charles Stross

Brad Abrams — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 04:33:15 GMT

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...(read more)

A new generation of programmers begins

Brad Abrams — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 03:16:33 GMT

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...(read more)

Book Review: Outliers

Brad Abrams — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 03:23:02 GMT

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......(read more)

Top Ten Reasons Why The Most Important Machine Is Unlabeled

Brad Abrams — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 04:57:00 GMT

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...(read more)

Need Windows Mobile Phone Recommendation

Brad Abrams — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 17:02:56 GMT

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......(read more)

A Live Mesh Moment

Brad Abrams — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 16:35:09 GMT

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"...(read more)

Very Simple .NET Thumbnail Creation Code

Brad Abrams — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 16:15:38 GMT

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"...(read more)

I have a theory... help me prove it!

Brad Abrams — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 04:48:25 GMT

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...(read more)

Ready for Houston TechFest Tomorrow?

Brad Abrams — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 12:39:07 GMT

Well, I got into Houston late last night and now all I have to do is talk to a few customers and fix up my demos for tomorrow’s TechFest 2007 ! This is a FREE event, brought to you by the good folks at the Houston .NET Users group (and their generous sponsors).. I will be talking about Silverlight and some other good stuff. I hope to see you there! Read More......(read more)

Devscovery in Redmond, WA and Silicon Valley

Brad Abrams — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 11:46:58 GMT

The good folks at Wintellect are putting on a conference focused on the latest of Microsoft technologies in Redmond and Silicon Valley (both at the Microsoft ft campus). This is a great chance to get some training from industry experts. Devscovery (August 14-16 at the Conference Center on campus; October 15-17 at the Microsoft Conference Center in Silicon Valley) is a three day, multi-track event produced by Wintellect. The keynote speaker at this year’s Redmond event is Mark Russinovich; John Robbins will deliver the Silicon Valley keynote. Other speakers include Jeffrey Richter, Jeff Prosise, John Robbins, Jason Beres, Walt Ritscher, Dennis Hurst, Bryan Sullivan, Scott Seely and Paul Mehner. Topics covered will include Silverlight, WPF, WCF...(read more)

Some help downloading Visual Studio 2008 Beta2...

Brad Abrams — Sat, 28 Jul 2007 12:09:16 GMT

OK, so as many of you have noticed, Visual Studio 2008 Beta2 is big (about 3GB for the ISO image). So this is the perfect sort of release to try out the new Microsoft Secure Content Downloader which is a technical preview from the folks at Microsoft research. The tool leverages the fact that there are 100s of other folks downloading the same file to speed things up considerably. (Notice, I am testing this out over a wireless modem, I'd suggest finding a a faster connection ;-)). Once it downloads the ISO image, you can burn it to a DVD or use something like ISOBuster . Download it here Read more about the technology here I'd love to hear how it goes for you... how long did it take you to download VS 2008 Beta2? In fact, the more of us that try...(read more)

Visual Studio in Second Life

Brad Abrams — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 04:19:00 GMT

Did you know that Microsoft is investing in Second Life? That is right... we recently bought an island and have developed it with some really cool stuff. Check out the details here https://www.visualstudioisland.com/ I am all for new, cutting edge stuff, so I volunteered to do a talk in the brand new auditorium we build there on the island. Not sure exactly what I am going to say yet, or really how I am going to say it... any tips would be really helpful as I am brand new to Second Life... It turns out there is quite a bit going on the island. Check out of few events: All times are PST.... 7/31 4:30 PM - Amanda Silver from VB fame will give a talk on Silverlight and VB.NET 8/21 4:00 PM - "Summer Luau" party... I can't wait to see what this is...(read more)

Help! My hard disk crashed

Brad Abrams — Sat, 23 Jun 2007 05:32:05 GMT

The kitchen laptop crashed today with a few weeks worth of unbacked up information (including pictures of the kids recent birthday party, and the like…) I tried booting off the XP recovery disk and running chkdsk, but about 60% of the way in I get an error: “The volume contains one or more unrecoverable problems” I have looked online and there a several “harddisk recovery programs”, but it is hard to know of any really work… Any thoughts or advice for me? Thanks Read More......(read more)

Defy All Challenges - Video Posted

Brad Abrams — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 00:26:00 GMT

I love the new VS " Defy All Challenges " theme.. One of the thing that gets me up in the morning (ok, more likely staying up at night) is the idea that we are helping development teams across the world create amazingly better solutions to their everyday challenges. I recently shot part of a Red Vs. Blue inspired video about exactly this... I was honored to be in amongst the some real heavy-hitters that I personally respect a ton! Soma , Anders Hejlsberg , Brian Harry , Scott Guthrie and KD Hallman all appear for short segments... Expect to see more soon! Video: Defy All Challenges Mix I'd love to hear what you think... Who do you think landed the best line? Read More......(read more)

Reason #73 that JavaScript is mainstream...

Brad Abrams — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 18:29:53 GMT

Well, I knew that JavaScript was becoming more mainstream, but I didn't realize it had reached this level.. Wired Al Yankovic's new song White & Nerdy mentions JavaScript right along with Klingon ... What's next? Ajax in a country music song? How might that go?? ;-) Watch the Video ... The reference is at about 1:10 Read More......(read more)