simplegeek

Presentations...

Wed, 22 Jan 2003 18:06:07 GMT

I speaking tomorrow at a internal Microsoft event. I've spoken at tons of conferences (PDC, TechEd, etc.) and for groups ranging form 1 to 2000. Today I did the rehearsal for one of the demos i'm going and it didn't really work... I had tomorrow blocked off to run through all the presentations to make sure i'm ready, but sometimes its good to get a little slap in the face to remind me to prepare adequatly... it's easy to get a little cavalier about these things...

Scott made a good posting about presentations also...

There can be only one... with data

Wed, 22 Jan 2003 06:42:30 GMT

Sean & Scott [fixed link]: The example you gave is great, although I would suggest something a little more robust, specifically you probably want to allow data to pass between the already running instance and the new one created (this allows you to marshal the command line arguments). I wrote an article on this last year... however supporting data marhsalling makes the code much much more nasty.

BTW, there were some minor bugs in the single instance logic that were fixed in next article in the series.

Quaker votes

Mon, 20 Jan 2003 22:00:43 GMT

Jerry (no blog) has been telling us all about a process they use for consensus [link from Michael] building in some standards meetings... apparently the Quaker vote is done by everyone voting on each item as one of:

a) Prefer
b) Can live with
c) Can't live with

The idea being that reasonable people will more quickly come to a decision with they understand what people are willing to tolerate and not. Seems interesting.

Several of us in my group are going off to do some architecture planning and I think we will have lots of challenges around consensus - we may have to put this to the test.

Japan and Management

Mon, 20 Jan 2003 21:02:44 GMT

I have always wanted to move to Japan. More specifically I have always wanted to live in a foreign country for long enough that I'm not just a tourist. I’ve been fortunate enough to travel a fair amount. I have been able to see Japan, Spain, USSR (while it still existed), etc. I find travel to be one of the most exciting and invigorating things you can do.

So the other day when an old friend called from Japan and said he had some open positions... To cut to the chase, I'm not moving to Japan. What is worth writing about?

[Note to other 'Softies - don't expect me to be moving anytime in the near future, i've got product to ship! <G>]

Good managers.

Before I had decided, I walked into my manager's office and started the conversation with "So, I've always wanted to move to Japan". He responded by asking about my motivations for considering this. I told him about how I had been thinking about this idea for a long time, it has been kind of a life goal. I told him that I was really happy where I was and that the only reason that I was considering this was that the opportunity had presented itself, and it was something I had always told myself that I would do at some point.

He told me that (of course) now would be a tough time for me to leave - however that if this was something that I really wanted to do that it was something we could talk about in the future. He described some other employees that had spent time in other countries.

I share this story to offer a counter to Emby's horror story. My manager didn't freak out, or anything else (or hid it well <G>) - rather he took the time to understand my reasoning and tried to offer potential solutions. Not only has my current manager done great things like this, but my past managers have also done things like this.

Management is about more that just ordering people to do things. Management is about having your success being measured by those that work for you. It is about spending time working for their career. It is by their achievements that you can accomplish great things.

I am always amazed at people that equate management and large organization with more power and control. As you get more employees you have to give up control. A good manager cannot dictate decisions. Your influence as a manager is done through investing in good employees. Good managers don't dictate - they lead. Management and leadership are very different skills.

Microsoft has really recognized the need for high quality managers. I've actually been participating in a new education program that they run internally that helps employees understand the pros and cons about becoming a manager. I am providing the perspective of someone that used to manage and now work as an individual contributor. Companies have to offer advancement paths inside and outside of management - happily Microsoft has done that.

XP and code reviews

Sun, 19 Jan 2003 10:46:13 GMT

CrazyBob and Chiara are debating XP... I haven't done true XP, however I can comment on some of the principles...

Many developers have massive egos. The simple practice of requiring every checkin to have a code review seems like a basic rule. Peer review should be a requirement. I have actually heard a developer say "No one can code review my changes, they are too complex."

I agree with CrazyBob about having someone review your changes keeps you honest. When I review changes I try to set a really high bar - and I want people to do the same for me. When you get caught up in writing tons of code, it is so easy to cut corners. I believe that we all need someone looking over our sholders to keep us honest. Maybe I'm the freak :)

I'm not sure that "pair programming" is the solution to this - but injecting some process into development is a good thing. It is all about balancing process and productivity.

A (very) little ASP.NET

Sat, 18 Jan 2003 10:19:10 GMT

Starting to inject some ASP.NET code into my site... I sure wish that Radio had a mode that evaluated it's script on the server with ASP.NET - i'd love to be able to add some more dynamic content to the server.

The first content - my list of movies.

Aggregators rock!

Thu, 16 Jan 2003 21:19:16 GMT

Wow... I hadn't played with any aggregators enough before, but Syndirella is really cool. The ability to fly through blogs with a simple space-space-space browsing is just awesome... it kills me that one or two my links don't have RSS feeds.

Another .NET RSS aggregator

Thu, 16 Jan 2003 20:28:09 GMT

Syndirella is pretty cool - nice UI, small download, lots of features... very cool! [Dave Winer]

Free C# IDE

Thu, 16 Jan 2003 00:12:42 GMT

SharpDevelop looks like a really cool tool. I thought it was pretty neat that I could switch the language for the IDE (English, Japanese, etc.) on the fly in the tool and the UI would automatically update. Pretty complete tool... forms designer, statement completion, project system, etc. Very slick!

Mary Jo Foley

Wed, 15 Jan 2003 22:57:10 GMT

From "Microsoft Watch" (newsletter):

"More and more Microsofties (past and present) are setting up Weblogs. Some are chronicling the debates inside Microsoft and the rest of the software industry. Others completely shy away from any mentions of their employer.

We've been building out our collection of Microsoft blogger bookmarks. Not too surprisingly, many of these folks are connected to Microsoft's developer/Web services divisions.

Here are a few of our favorites:

Joshua Allen's Better Living Through Software

(Allen's site includes a list of other Microsoft bloggers)

Simple Geek: Chris Anderson's Blog

Microsoft Web Services Kingpin Don Box

For more Microsoft Web Services-related blogs, check this site.

New Microsoft Hire Peter Drayton

Dare "Carnage4Life" Obasanjo"

No commentary on the rest of the article, but it is interesting to see how much blogging is in the mainstream (more reason I'm frustrated at my complete ignorance of this before december...)

.NET Strongly typed collection generator

Tue, 14 Jan 2003 20:44:09 GMT

Pretty nice implementation...However it is a bit hard to find the setup... It works great though.

Mon, 13 Jan 2003 19:09:11 GMT

Interesting .NET read...

OutBlob 0.1... Exchange + Outlook + Blog...

Mon, 13 Jan 2003 07:17:01 GMT

Scott W: Looks like a very nice blogging solution using Outlook as the editor and Exchange as the blog store.

Integration and Simplicity

Sun, 12 Jan 2003 19:54:42 GMT

My frustration over upgrading my in-laws PC drove me to write "Integration and Simplicity Upgrades". I wrote it as a Radio "story" instead of a rant, because I hadn't used that feature yet :)

China "say no" to blogging

Sat, 11 Jan 2003 23:10:14 GMT

Dave's got a great list of links about this... scary...

Blogs at work

Sat, 11 Jan 2003 23:06:49 GMT

InfoWorld sees blogs in the enterprise [from Dave Winer]. Amar (coworker) brought this up to me (the idea of using a blog for internal communication) and it seemed really interesting. It would be a great way for people to see what execs are up to and thinking about...

Personalities

Thu, 09 Jan 2003 23:36:15 GMT

Jason: I'm never a huge fan of string based designs, primarily because of their lack of compile time validation, etc... however, lets think about modifying your "Personality" pattern to work in .NET...

If you made the data type of "Personality" be a System.Type object, then you could do a reasonable assignment:

machine.Personality = typeof(ScanSideways);

This presents a could of interesting problems. First, you have a compile time dependancy on the ScanSideways class. Easily fixable by a slight change:

machine.Personality = Type.GetType("ScanSideways");

Which you can now parameterize, load from a file, whatever. So far, this is cake. My problem is that we have lots all the type checking. At some point the program will take the type object (even the strongly typed version) and do an Activator.CreateInstance call followed by a cast to the correct data type. Boom.

Personally, I wish there was a way of specifying the constraints of a particular type, some form of validation rules that could be applied (hey, wait! you mentioned that earlier in your post <G>). For example I could say:

public class Machine {
[BaseType(typeof(Personality))]
Type Personality { get; set; }
}

Which could then give me compile time validation for the first example, and a more deterministic error for the second one. Oh well... can't extend the compiler...

Just to restate (to make sure I understand the pattern); the goals of the Personality pattern is to provide a set of property adjustments and validations that are applied on function execution. Kinda like a pre/post condition on methods bundled with a CSS sheet.

Cool.

Video games

Thu, 09 Jan 2003 22:16:57 GMT

Wired: At least i'm not the only one that sees arena of video game fans as an interesting thing to write about.

As a side note - is it arrogant to link to your own blog?

CVS on the Web

Thu, 09 Jan 2003 00:35:24 GMT

Just to truly demonstrate how sheltered of a life that I have lived... tonight I installed WinCVS and connected to Joe Beda's (coworker, blog coming soon!) CVS server over the internet. I checked out a module, made a change, and submitted it. I'm so used to the internal systems at MSFT that it just blows my mind to use a source control system that works seamlessly over the internet through multiple firewalls, etc... technology rocks!

The web is read/write

Thu, 09 Jan 2003 00:20:09 GMT

Dan: "Hollywood and the other members of the entertainment cartel do not believe in a two-way or multi-directional Web. They believe they are sending their content to consumers, not customers who want to build their own content or, crucially, communities."

Unfortunately that applies to way to many large corporate web presences also...

Why I hate Radio

Thu, 09 Jan 2003 00:14:13 GMT

Why, oh why, did Radio decide that an HTML page was the way to implement a client application?? I have lost 2 large entries so far with Radio... once I commited the "sin" of clicking an icon on my desktop... IE navigated to that page, my entry was gone... just now, I accidentally clicked the back button on my mouse, boom! another entry gone.

Given that Radio is a "smart client" application (being that it runs a complete WEB SERVER) on my machine, why couldn't they actually write a real client application to do editing?

Oh well... i really need to write my own blog authoring tool...

Safari on the blog

Wed, 08 Jan 2003 23:04:54 GMT

As Dave Winer points out, this is exactly what the web is about... (not to be too biased, i'll also point out that this ASP.NET site is pretty cool also...) in both cases you have one to one communication between the community developers and the product team developers. Of course, one of the best things about the Safari link is that Dave Hyatt is actually posting patches in almost real time! That is damn cool!

Another test

Wed, 08 Jan 2003 19:51:23 GMT

uhm... this time actually using the wireless portion of the wireless hub... kinda cheating when you still have a cable plugged in...

New wireless test

Wed, 08 Jan 2003 19:47:17 GMT

Since the Linksys wouldn't let me blob, I borrowed a friend's Microsoft wireless hub... if this post appears, then all is working happily!

Logging in .NET

Tue, 07 Jan 2003 22:13:17 GMT

Question from my brother Brent:

Is there a way to determine what file and method called my function? I have a logging object that I would like to be able to automatically add the function, file, and line number of the caller.

Also, I'd like to automatically generate debug output when a function begins and exits

there are a couple options here...

If you want to profile, there are several profilers (Rational, Numega, etc.) and they are are managed aware. Given that you want this for logging, etc, there are even more options, read on...

You can use context bound objects and produce a somewhat heavy, but really cool framework for auto-logging, which can give you the begin/exit outputs
You can use the StackTrace class to get file, line, and function name information at any point during execution

The caution I would give about either of these is performance. ContextBoundObject has some significant performance implication, as does using the StackTrace class. In addition, the StackTrace class will only give file and line information if the PDB is available.

Since C# doesn't support macros (a good thing, btw), you are faced with either hand coding a lot of Debug.Write*(...) method calls, or living without this feature.

Maybe this is something we should think about adding to .NET? you could imagine something that plugs into the JIT and lets you compile in pre/post code for any method... ouch, and API into the JIT - that sounds scary. Maybe we shouldn't consider this :)

Parsing things you don't understand

Tue, 07 Jan 2003 21:42:34 GMT

Jon's fascination with libraries has given him a deep understanding of the ISBN format. This reminds me of all the people that "whip" together a XML parser and forget to support all the complex corners of it. Everything is much more complicated than it first seems once you have understood it completely.

Favorite bug of the day: Someone was parsing version numbers and thought the format was always 4 sets of 1-4 digits separated by periods. (1.23.456.5678)... of course, the actual format for version numbers is 4 DWORDs, which, when printed can be many more characters long... boy I wish people would read specs before writing code!

Macworld

Tue, 07 Jan 2003 21:22:30 GMT

Wow... a lot of traffic about macworld... Keynote, Safari, and a 17" Powerbook. oh my!

The most interesting news (to me, at least) - Safari being an open source web browser based on KHTML... awesome to see Apple take on something like this.

Windows Media Player

Tue, 07 Jan 2003 20:38:22 GMT

ok... this may be against blog-ettiquete... Windows Media 9 released today... coolest player feature - the ability to have a minized player appear in your taskbar... I appologize in advance it the mention of this has offended, angered, or otherwise pissed you off... now, get over it! :)

And if Don likes it, it can't be all bad.

Real World Applications

Tue, 07 Jan 2003 20:28:35 GMT

Drew: I'm glad you liked the sample. I was supposed to do one entry a month, but I've fallen way - way! - behind...

GameBoy Advanced Advanced?

Tue, 07 Jan 2003 20:22:51 GMT

Did you ever want to pimp out your gameboy?

Email Responsiveness

Mon, 06 Jan 2003 21:57:29 GMT

I'm not sure if this is a universal truth or not, but I suspect it is.

People can't manage their email.

This isn't a spam problem or tool problem. This is about people that don't understand how to deal with mail in a timely fashion and manage their time. I have seen people that proclaim proudly that they have 4,000 messages in their inbox with 1,000 unread items. It must make them feel important to be so popular?

It is time to take a stand. We must demand action.

Jeff Bogdan (a coworker) and I have been trying a new system. We basically compete with each other to keep our inbox as small as possible. We read mail several times a day and try to respond, file, or delete each mail as we read it. The goal - less that 20 messages in your inbox.

It's amazing - Once you get your email under control the frustration you feel when someone isn't responsive to your mail is even worse. We are hoping that we can use shame and humiliation as a tool to convince others to follow our lead on agressively managing mail.

This is such a huge deal at a company like Microsoft. We communicate almost exclusively through email. It is not uncommon for people to get 200 mails a day, with some people toping at over 500. I'm sure that many other large companies out there are the same way. People get bogged down in mail, stop responding, and next thing you know you are always walking down to someone's office asking them to read you mail right away. Or, even worse, you start tagging every mail with a !

Read mail several times a day (not continuosly, but also not only in the AM or PM)
When reading mail try to respond, file, or delete the mail when you first read it. The goal is to touch each mail only once.
Use Outlook (or whatever program is your favorite) to auto-file large mass mailing lists into folders so that they don't pile up in your inbox and hide important mails.
Keep less than 20 mails in your inbox.

Next soapbox... Meeting etiquette, but i'll save that for later.

C# for Eclipse

Mon, 06 Jan 2003 20:29:39 GMT

Spoke too soon... need to read blogs more carefully...

Java VM for .NET?

Mon, 06 Jan 2003 20:28:35 GMT

Chris: that is one of the coolest things that I've seen in a long time! I love the idea behind Eclipse (open source pluggable IDE), it's just too bad it doesn't have support for C# <G>

Msft blog on

Mon, 06 Jan 2003 19:22:12 GMT

Chris: Count me in... i'm always up for a night on the town!

Back in seattle

Mon, 06 Jan 2003 18:26:38 GMT

Chris Sells is hanging around Seattle today and tomorrow... hmm... that can only spell trouble :)

A little friendly competition...

Mon, 06 Jan 2003 01:12:18 GMT

Turns out that Dare isn't the only 'softie writing a .NET RSS browser... Joe Beda (no blog to speak of, yet!) also wrote one and forwarded me the code, etc... hopefully he'll let me post it. As a side note - Joe wins for the best product name "Aggregator of Syndicated Sites" or "ASS" for short.

Dare, Joe, can't we all work together on this? :)

.NET News Aggregator?

Sun, 05 Jan 2003 23:01:01 GMT

Dare Obasanjo: Can I get a copy of your .NET code? looks pretty promissing...

Apple Switch

Sun, 05 Jan 2003 22:52:27 GMT

Should apple switch? It would be pretty cool to see OS/X running on an Intel!

Compatability

Sun, 05 Jan 2003 09:50:00 GMT

I got to meet Ray Ozzie last month and we got on talking about his history and the computer industry. He happened to have an old copy of the original VisiCalc lying around, so he mailed it around later. The amazing thing is that sucker still runs. It runs on XP and the internal versions of Longhorn... very cool. When thinking about building platforms, that kind of compatability is amazing.

UI design

Sun, 05 Jan 2003 09:44:59 GMT

Since Doug mentioned me doing lots of GUI stuff, I thought I'd mention an interesting UI design book - About Face. It's worth a read, although I think that Cooper goes a little bit far in saying that the "File" menu should be nuked. There are some things that don't always follow a rational model, but get ingrained into the system so deeply that you shouldn't try to change them. I agree with probably 80% of the book though - self describing UI, error messages with intelligible text (and solutions), etc... basically stuff that MS typically does poorly... although hopefully we are starting to show signs of improving.

The question for Doug is - are you going to JavaOne this year?

Outlook does blogs?

Sat, 04 Jan 2003 21:44:14 GMT

Greg Reinacker: Has a weblog integrated into Outlook... i'd give it a try!

Linksys WAP11 + Radio == no work

Fri, 03 Jan 2003 14:32:43 GMT

What ever black magic made this work last night isn't working right now. For the time being I have to plug my machine directly into my cable modem to get publish to work. Otherwise the FTP connection just times out. I've tried every combination of SPI, DMZ, PASV, etc, that I can think of. If anyone has a suggestion, let me know!

New site

Fri, 03 Jan 2003 01:50:06 GMT

Well, after banging on pipes enough I finally got this whole thing working. Black voodoo magic.

Thanks to Brian for getting the server side going...

Computers, Wireless, and FTP

Fri, 03 Jan 2003 01:29:36 GMT

OK, another reason to hate computers.

1. Radio bites that it uses a crapy HTML interface to type in entries. I just lost another log entry because I accidentally doubled clicked a link on my desktop and POW!

2. I can't convince my Linksys WAP11 router to let FTP (as a client) work. Still can't quite understand this posting that should theoretically help.

3. My friend that is hosting my site to be can't get Win2K's server to actually allow a non-admin FTP only account to login through FTP... that's useful.

Ugh...

www.simplegeek.com

Thu, 02 Jan 2003 22:49:06 GMT

My new site is at least on the web. Next step, move my blog over to that box! yeah!

Ransom

Thu, 02 Jan 2003 22:42:01 GMT

Ransom as a software business model... how interesting. Found this article from a link on Kuro5hin.

Generics and .NET

Thu, 02 Jan 2003 14:43:58 GMT

Microsoft research has a CLI implementation with generics support... At several conferences we have publically said that generics will be added to some future version of .NET. With those two pieces of data, I pose the question - how wide spread should generics be used? Was ATL goodness, or something taken a bit too far?

For those of you unfamiliar with generics, they are basically C++ templates implemented at the runtime level. I'm not a compiler wonk, so I have to go with my most basic understanding - essentially the CLR would do dynamic class generation at runtime, thuse preventing code bloat, but giving you the performance benefit of strongly typed classes. In addition, since the runtime maintains the identity of the class being a generic, features like reflection actually work correctly.

Chris Sells

Thu, 02 Jan 2003 14:23:24 GMT

So if you read my career history (which isn't mandetory to understand the rest of this post) you will see that I spent a bunch of time working on Microsoft's WFC and then WinForms for .NET. In the later part of this, I got the chance to meet Chris Sells. Chris wrote, debugged, and deployed what I believe to be the first real over-the-web Windows Forms application (wahoo). In the process he continued to find bugs and issues with our deployment and security model. Hopefully with the release of Everett (.NET 1.1, should be out "soon") most of these issues will be resolved. Just had to give chris props... you rock! :)

Computing rant

Tue, 31 Dec 2002 16:55:19 GMT

Ugh... i know we have all heard it before. I'm the IT administrator for my home network, I have to debug all my friends and family's tech problems. The latest. My wireless network is flaky downstairs. On top of that, the cablemodem drops it's IP address and refuses to renew unless I hard boot the bugger. I finally moved my wireless hub... just a little. My reception downstairs went from a "low" or "no signal" or a "good" (4 bars!) wahoo!

Next, of course, is my mother-in-law's home computer. Here is a great example of why computers are horrible. She turned on her computer, got some wierd error about running "scandisk" (yes, I know what it is, but she doesn't) rebooted the thing, and now it won't start at all. Computers are horrible. Since the computer is several years old I just want to replace the whole thing, but it does seem a little ridiculous that you have to replace a machine every couple of years when all she wants to do is browse the web and send email.

XBox, History, and Houses

Sun, 29 Dec 2002 23:46:46 GMT

Spent a big chunk of today playing 6 player Halo over at a friend’s house. That game is so amazing. We talk a little bit about the idea of video games being a spectator sport. Not a new or novel concept. In fact there are people getting paid to play video games today. There are, of course, professional testers and play testers, but then there are also those people paid to play massively multiplayer games (like Everquest and Ashron’s Call). I have a friend that was given free online time with AC if he agreed to tutor people online. The interesting thing was that there was a team meeting for a large division at work where there were probably 100 spectators watching a Halo tournament. How long until there is an arena? :)

Finished the weasel, but guns is taking longer. A very interesting thing in guns is the idea of history in the large. I remember reading the Foundation books (well, some of them) and in that (if memory serves) Asimov has this concept of future history. That you can basically predict the behavior of the human species over a long enough time. In the book they perfect this technique and can really predict the future. In guns Diamond talks about history using these broad strokes of time. He talks about “short” time spans being 1,000 years. Distances are measured in the time it takes for ideas and people to populate an area, saying that the Americas were populated in a short 8,000 years from the time the first people came across the straight.

There are some great passages in the book where Diamond talks about the fact that historians can’t agree on a reason for why certain people adopt technologies. He lists of a litany of alternative ideas, and then states that since no one can agree, and there are so many options, that this can be seen as a random occurrence and therefore he can look at this in the large scale. Heh heh.

Another very interesting part discusses the creation of written language. He has a really interesting narrative about a Cherokee Indian named Sequoyah that invented a written language for the Cherokee around 1820. Sequoyah had seen English writing, but didn’t understand it. He saw the value, and therefore created his own version. Makes what we all do each day seem like a bit trivial – did you invent written language today?

On a final note, we are thinking of buying a new house. We just refinanced, but given the low interest rates and our desire to start a family in the next year or so is making it seem like a reasonable option. Our agent sent us a bunch of listings tonight. We aren’t in a great rush, or really convinced that we should do it, but we’ll see…

Career history

Tue, 24 Dec 2002 15:12:11 GMT

Reading “On Becoming a Leader” has been really interesting, mostly because it suggests that a key differentiator of leaders is the vision that leaders provide, while others are content to be driven. Interestingly I have been spending a lot of time at work trying to determine what I should be trying to do... I have been asking a lot of people to try and understand what my role should be, but instead I should have been defining my vision. Coincidentally enough I’ve been working on a vision document around developers as a core customer base...

Thinking about my career path is interesting. I started software development in grade school. I wrote a math quiz program that we used for about 1 day in class. I wrote some interesting stuff in middle school; Snake Bit, a Nibbles clone – although at the time I was cloning Snake Byte, an Apple II program, and a GUI environment... although I may have wrote that closer to high school... In high school I decided that I was going into architecture and took several classes. Eventually I determined that I spent more time configuring and learning AutoCAD than I was learning about architecture, so I decided to continue down the software course.

I have worked a bunch of fastfood/retail jobs, but the one of interest for this story is Waldensoftware. When I left they had just been bought out by Electronic Boutique (now EBX). It was interesting to watch a brick and mortar bookseller like Waldenbooks run a software store... anyway, more on that later – the interesting note is that it was at Waldensoftware that I began talking with lots of software people. At the time Waldensoftware was a fairly book oriented store, so we got lots of actual developers in. Here I met Jim Flippin. He was a regular customer.

Years later (literally) I got a call out of the blue from Jim. At the time I was managing a mail order role playing game selling company (RPGI, which has sense gone out of business). Jim offered me a chance to interview at Microsoft, which I jumped at. I bought a suit, and showed up for interviews as a contract tester in the IT department. I barely got the job... apparently I only got 1 hire out of 4 interviews.

I spent about 6 months working as a tester. I read books on how to test software, I wrote a new front end to our test case management software and learned about T-SQL (since we were testing a database system). During this time I got to know the development team pretty well, and eventually they approached me about going full time and becoming a developer. I interviewed and got hired.

About 2 months later a couple guys started talking to me about starting their own company, and wanted to know if I was interested. After some soul searching I decided that if I was ever going to do it, now would be the best time. I have the least to loose. So, I quit Microsoft and joined Versametrix – although we didn’t think of that name for another week or so. Oddly enough, that was a couple months before my wedding... needless to say, my wife-to-be’s family was a tad bit concerned about me striking off on my own.

We spent about 5 months doing some pretty hard core development. We were building a relational OLAP system and I was the primary coder. I wrote in IDL, C++, VB, and some Java – although Java was somewhat new, and we weren’t to sure where that would go. We still had a lot of contacts in at Microsoft and we started to hear about some new developments in the OLAP space that Microsoft was going to be doing. We got a bit scared, decided that we couldn’t really sell our software to people if we didn’t believe it would last for years, and in the end I decided to return to Microsoft. Of course, with hindsight, I can see that not much came of the MS OLAP solution, and we could have competed fairly well. However, I was happy to return to Microsoft, as I discovered that I really missed the company.

I came back to MSFT as a developer in developer division working on controls in the Visual Basic group. It was odd... when I left MS I was just starting as a developer, when I returned I was seen as a junior (but not green) developer. The people at MS really respected that I started my own company, and the experience of doing it gave me a lot of credibility that college hires didn’t have. (did I mention that during my first turn at MS was when I decided to drop out of college?)

Anyway, the controls team split, I worked on Ironwood – which then became WFC, Microsoft’s Windows Foundation Classes, a Win32 library for Java that shipped in Visual J++ 6.0. That was an amazing time. We had a great small team working under a huge deadline. The team had originally bet on AWT, but we were unable to produce reasonably performant code and the AWT stuff was just too limited. We spent some time investigating AFC (another Microsoft Java library). That was feature rich, but was amazingly slow and hard to build tools on. In the end we decided to create our own framework. I say “we”, but I had no part in the decision. I was just along for the ride at that point.

After we shipped VJ6 (and then had Sun sue us, get enjoined, recalled product, etc, etc) the bulk of the WFC team moved onto working on the .NET project. At that time it didn’t have much of a name or identity. There was a lot of interesting discussions going on about frameworks and runtime libraries (like a new virtual machine for VB, etc.). The WFC team was part of the VB team at the time, and we had a whole new branch added to the WFC team that was focused on server development.

After a reorg or two, we ended up merging a bunch of teams, and moving over into what would become the .NET Developer Platform (NDP) team. We had two main pieces, the Framework team (FX) and the Runtime team (CLR). The WFC/Server team became the web services, diagnostics, server process, etc, team… basically a collection of feature teams on the FX team, while the WFC team became the WinForms team. We added the ASP.NET team, Net classes library (NCL), and the Base class library (BCL) team eventually.

We shipped .NET Framework 1.0 with a bang... well, a really long bang. One that started in 2000 at the PDC when we shipped Beta 1, but went on for a long time as we shipped finally in February 2002. Near the end of the V1 schedule I moved from a development lead on the team to a development manager – mostly because I don’t think anyone else wanted the job . I was managing a team of 40 people through a massive security push during the final 4 months of the product. It was a really fun and challenging task. Once we finished, I decided to go back to being a technical contributor instead of a manager, and was offered an architect position on the newly formed .NET Client team.

A couple of interesting notes – Microsoft loves reorgs. We reorganize teams all the time. I think it is one of the strengths of the company. When we finished .NET 1.0 we knew that we needed to focus more on customers, and the growing size of the framework. So we created separate product units for the server portions of the framework (ASP.NET) and the client portions (.NET Client). In addition, we moved a large team that was working in incubation mode into the NDP group. This is the team that has since produced all the GXA specs, and is driving web services for Microsoft.

The second interesting note is more of a sidebar: the title of Architect. I’m not sure how other companies treat this, but at Microsoft it is a kind of religion. There are huge proponents of architects and people that think they are fluffy big sky thinkers that can’t ship anything to save their lives. Real product team architects are somewhat rare – probably less that 5% of any development organization. I had always wanted to be an architect as a career goal – but I always saw it as something far off in the ether. I looked at someone like Anders Heljsberg as what an architect really was. This is someone that could ship product, has created multiple languages in his career, and can captivate an audience of any size. I feel that although I finally got the architect title, I was very much an apprentice. I hope that in another 10 or 15 years I can measure up to someone like Anders, Dave Cutler, Ray Ozzie, or any of the other architects in the industry.

After some time working as an architect on the Client team, I decided to move over to the core Windows Client Platform team. This group was working on the next generation of client presentation technologies (I avoid the word “UI” because of internal bickering between the “Document” folks and “UI” folks...). Here I began to really get a feel for how little of Microsoft I really knew about.

Anyway, that is it, in a rather large nutshell. Here I sit as an architect in the Windows Client Platform team, still an apprentice. Trying to figure out what I should do. I’ve been with Microsoft for over 6 years now. I still feel like a newbi. My recent introduction to blogs and the rest of the industry has made be very aware of the “ivory tower” that people always accuse Microsoft of living in.

My first and biggest passion has been learning. When I first got the opportunity to interview at Microsoft I was told this was a job working with SQL. So I went out and bought a book on T-SQL and taught myself as much as I could over the weekend. I am continually confronted with new opportunities to learn about things and I love it!