December 2005 - Posts
I'm blogging from the Fort Wayne International Airport in Indiana. I was very surprised to find that the wireless internet was free here. I don't really fly that often, but all the airports I've been to halfway recently haven't had free internet. It's usually pretty cheap, like 6 or 7 dollars, but still something. I'm impressed with businesses that give out free internet access. I'm not a coffee drinker, but if I was, I would rather hang out at a Panera Bread than Starbucks, because Starbucks charges for their internet (unless you're a T-Mobile customer) and Panera is free. In my opinion, it just makes good business sense to have free internet. Especially now while not everyone has it.
On a related note, when are wireless routers going to come with a way to allow me to let anonymous users into my wireless pipe, but with say an extremely limited connection out and no access to my local network? I think if everyone started having the attitude of the internet being everywhere and open (at least a little), it would get easier and easier to get online. Kind of a you scratch my back, I scratch yours sort of thing. Anyway...time to fly back to Sea-Town...later...
Update: George put up a cool link to do the sort of thing I talked about in this entry. Check it out!
As Scoble pointed out, our team has gotten the new and improved version of MicrosoftGadgets.com up and running. Adam and I spent a few really long nights cramming as much cool stuff as we and our team could think of into this release. If you're into developing gadgets for live.com, this is the place for you. If you just want to see some cool gadgets that have been developed by the community, come check out our Gadget Gallery. Here's a summary of the new features...
Home Page - Redesign
- Getting Started
- Random Featured Gadget
- Top 5 Downloads
- Last 5 Gadgets
Gallery - Redesigned Interface and Gadget Preview
- Download Count
- View by Creator (RSS also)
- View By Tag (RSS also)
- View By Creator & Tag (RSS also)
- Tag Search
- User Tag Favorites (including Unread Count)
- New Download Count Sort By option
Gadget Detail View - Redesign
- Tags
- Report Bad Gadget
- Broken Gadget Banner
Repair Shop - Reported bad by community
- Confirmed by Microsoft
- Forum Thread for discussing broken gadgets
- Fix/Approve/Reinstate gadget
Add Gadget - New Wizard Interface
- Manifest Validation
- AJAX Style Interface
- Tagging
User Profile Miscellaneous - Pretty Urls
- RSS Everywhere
- Passport Bug fixes
- Performance Enhancements
Hope you enjoy my first major release at Microsoft. If you've got some feedback on the site we'd love to hear it. Send feedback here on my blog or on the site.
Oh and btw, we had a lot of fun at Jeff's place playing XBox 360 and fixing a couple bugs while we were at it. ;)
http://www.microsoft.com/events/mix
I won't go into too much detail and let the official site explain, but basically, Microsoft is going to host a really cool conference in Vegas in March. At its simplest this is going to be a great place for developers and designers to come together and learn and discuss how we can all develop super, cool, web experiences. This is not your typical Microsoft conference, but it will be "typically" awesome! I'll be there! :)
P.S. I can officially say I've developed a page that's on Microsoft.com now. How fun!?!? ;)
I know I just posted about another video on Channel 9 and there are a ton of great videos on Channel 9, but I just have to post about this one. Everyone should check it out. It is totally awesome (like whoa) and you can even "hear" Scoble's jaw drop open. ;) The Virtual Earth team has taken maps to a whole new level!
http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=143952
Oh and check it out...I work here. Click on "bird's eye view" when it comes up.
If you're interested in what Microsoft is working on to help you better develop multi-threaded applications, you need to watch this phenominal video! Extremely passionate and smart guys working on this. Another great video for the Going Deep Show!
Just had to post this one more time. This is
a hair saving post by Scott Guthrie on how to get intellisense to work again if it stops working in the web.config file and why it stops working, as well as just pointing out how cool the intellisense is in the first place! Thanks, Scott! :)
http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/
There's a new concept of "shows" on Channel 9 today. You can think of shows as a group of "things" like videos, podcasts, threads, etc as episodes. At the time of this writing, there are 3 shows. This is a really neat new idea for Channel 9 so check it out, subscribe to your favorites and keep coming back for more!
Technically, this is also my first public code written at Microsoft. It's not much though. All I did was most of the underlying database work and setup the rss feeds. Adam did a great job on the interface for shows!
Enjoy!
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