aaron's weblog : Miscellaneous

Smartphone Development Resources

aaronbrethorst — Tue, 01 Feb 2005 18:33:00 GMT

It almost goes without saying that I'm completely addicted to my Windows Mobile-based phone. I have an Audiovox SMT 5600, which runs Windows Mobile 2003 and has support built in for the .Net Compact Framework. There's something wonderfully compelling about being able to easily write apps code for smaller devices while still being able to use a world-class IDE to handle everything related to them.

Anyway, I found a great collection of links this morning on developing apps for the Compact Framework that I wanted to share (and add a few of my own):

"Best of Articles :: Smartphone Programming" - http://weblogs.asp.net/nleghari/articles/smartphone.aspx
"Writing Mobile Games Using the Microsoft .NET Compact Framework" - http://msdn.microsoft.com/smartclient/understanding/netcf/dev/default.aspx?pull=/library/en-us/dnnetcomp/html/netcfgaming.asp
"Collection of .Net Framework Blogs" - http://www.explosivedog.com/blog/archive/2004/04/17/231.aspx
OpenNetCF Project - http://www.opennetcf.org
MSDN Mobile and Embedded Developer Center - http://msdn.microsoft.com/mobility/

Halo 2 Has Gone Gold!!!

aaronbrethorst — Mon, 11 Oct 2004 20:13:00 GMT

http://www.bungie.net/News/TopStory.aspx?story=GoneGoldAnnouncer&p=811577

I want to congratulate all of the flaming ninjas over at Bungie, you guys rock! Man, I can't wait until this ships! :-)

Mount St. Helens Pictures

aaronbrethorst — Thu, 07 Oct 2004 20:33:00 GMT

Apologies about the lack of blogging over the past two months. I will get back to it soon, I've just been unfortunately swamped. Anyway, the USGS has a set of really amazing photos of Mount St. Helens from the past few days. Well worth the look. They come in sizes up to 650x400 pixels and so, and look terrific as desktop backgrounds.

(Link)

Update:
There are volcano pics from Thursday at the link above, I'd suggest checking there for more content. :-)

Review Time

aaronbrethorst — Fri, 25 Jun 2004 08:53:00 GMT

I finally just finished writing my annual performance review. I've been working on this thing for the past few days in fits and spurts, but I really needed to have it done for my meeting with my Lead Program Manager, Jason, later this morning. In other news, I spent 4 or 5 hours today logging bugs against all of the applications we ship that don't have ComCtl 6 manifest files attached to them. Although I've been working on Windows XP theme support for a good long while now, it still amazes me how much better an application on Windows can look after ComCtl 6 gets used. There was a very painful incongruous feeling to working in the now-quite-lovely DevEnv application, and then firing up the Guid generator. I'm happy to report that every .exe we ship in a Visual Studio box should look themed under Windows XP by the time we release the application. This is a major step in the right direction for us. We certainly aren't done yet, though; I just discovered another batch of unthemed controls buried in Tools.Options today. I've committed myself to several major projects in FY2005. One fun thing that I will do is publish a content management system I developed for the Developer Division UI Guidelines website as ASP.Net 2.0 sample code. It will need to be ported to 2.0, cleaned up, and have some more features added, but that's all part of the fun for me :-). Another commitment I'm making for this year is to publish articles on WinForms UI layout for MSDN. I don't feel like there's nearly enough content on this sort of thing out there today, and I'd really like to rectify this. Heck, the Windows Ux Guidelines don't even *touch* pixels today! Anyway, that's enough from me for the time being. I need to be up in six hours to keep making cool software. I'll be posting more soon, and I will still cover the topics I promised I'd cover before. (p.s. to james lau - .text works fine under Safari on Panther for me, I think it's just your computer)

Slashdot

aaronbrethorst — Wed, 28 Apr 2004 04:46:00 GMT

Apparently I wasn't the only person to link to Chris Pratley's phenomenal blog entry about the history of Word today. I just discovered that Chris's blog entry appeared on the front page of Slashdot earlier today. It's shocking I didn't notice this before, seeing as how I will usually open up Slashdot during lunch for 5 or 10 minutes. I thought that some of the comments related to the story were really quite interesting, but don't forget that you can turn up the moderation filtering.

The Microsoft Way

aaronbrethorst — Tue, 27 Apr 2004 19:21:00 GMT

From Chris Pratley: “So, that in a nutshell is the Microsoft method. Understand the market, and the customers, and then go pedal to the metal, with release after release focused on what the customers need, incorporating their feedback.”

Burritos

aaronbrethorst — Mon, 01 Mar 2004 06:04:00 GMT

I'm sure that most of you don't care about this, especially since it has nothing to do with technology whatsoever, but I am very excited to announce that a Chipotle (!!!!!) will be opening in Seattle sometime soon. Yay! I've been missing gigantic Chipotle burritos ever since I moved to Seattle last November. For everyone who has never heard of this place, it's apparently a lot like Tacos Del Mar. The Chipotle will be on University Ave in Seattle right around 45th Street. I highly recommend checking it out at least once. It's really that good.

Joel Spolsky

aaronbrethorst — Fri, 27 Feb 2004 17:58:00 GMT

I don't think I've mentioned here how much I love Joel Spolsky. So, let me just make this clear: I think Joel's absolutely hilarious (not to mention quite smart). Back in the early 90s, he was a Program Manager in Excel. Since then, he founded his own company, Fog Creek Software. Here's a choice quote from today (as I sit here at work in my gap jeans and banana republic sweater): “Ah, polo shirts and khaki pants. I miss Redmond. Where else can you go to the Gap on Sunday, come back to work the next day, and find twelve other program managers wearing the exact same thing you just bought?”

Just a bit of levity for your Friday morning :-).

Cool development technologies

aaronbrethorst — Wed, 11 Feb 2004 18:17:00 GMT

I think most people by now have heard about the complaints being registered about how it seems like every Microsoft blogger is talking about Whidbey, Longhorn, or other future technologies. I'm certainly guilty of this at times. There's no question about that. So, with that in mind, I wanted to write about five of my favorite technologies available today that work with .Net.

VSIP SDK - The Visual Studio Industry Partner SDK lets you develop add-ins for Visual Studio to extend its functionality.
ASP.Net Web Matrix - A free tool that supports WYSIWYG ASP.Net development.
Rotor - A significant portion of the .Net toolset; this includes the CLI (the ECMA standard version of the .Net runtime, a C# compiler, a J# compiler, and significant portion of the .Net Framework). Rotor runs on FreeBSD, Mac OS X, and Windows. There are patches available to let it run on Panther, too.
Amazon.com Web Services - Build data driven apps powered by Amazon.com's data stores.
.Text - A free, powerful blogging engine for IIS, written on .Net.

William Gibson

aaronbrethorst — Tue, 03 Feb 2004 21:05:00 GMT

William Gibson, of Neuromancer fame, is speaking at Microsoft today (actually, in a half-hour). I'm sitting in the front row of a lecture room waiting for his talk to begin. I was quite saddened that I forgot my copy of Pattern Recognition at home today, as I would've liked to have had it signed. Nevertheless, the good people at Penguin (his publishing company) appear to have come well-prepared, armed not just with copies of every single book of his, but with a credit card processor as well. Ah, lovely. And here I was doing my best not to blow tons of money on books this month. What a tragedy. On the plus side of things, I have been floundering around for ideas for a good friend's birthday. It looks like the perfect birthday present just slapped me across the face like a Pythonian fish.

-------------

William Gibson on William Gibson: “he was rambling and brief, and not even that brief.”

Similarities between Pattern Recognition, and Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive were not overtly intentional. “I am never conciously trying to make a meta-work, it's an accretion.”

“I don't have the hard cultural shell of a Windows user; I don't have the carapace, the resentment! My sense of Microsoft is your grandmother's sense of microsoft, reading about it in the paper.“

“i don't think we're at one of those jumping off points yet; it's hard to tell. all of the noise of marketing promotion tries to tell us that we are.“

“Accessing [the part of myself that writes sci-fi] is a long painful experience that involves lots of typing.“

U of Minnesota Recruiting Wrapup

aaronbrethorst — Sat, 31 Jan 2004 06:35:00 GMT

I have been really bad about blogging in the past week because it's just been nuts for me. Unlike Scoble, blogging tends to be the first thing I cut from my daily list of activities (a double-edged sword, for sure). In any case, I imagine that I will be more faithful about it in the near future. Of course, as Whidbey nears release I will have more to talk about, so stay tuned for that at some point (note: I am not giving any hints whatsoever about our release date here. I am very much a fan of the Bungie/Halo 2 approach to talking about these things when it's appropriate, and definitely not before).

In any case, the U of Minnesota Recruiting drive was great! I met a lot of very interesting undergraduate and graduate students, and it was very exciting to get their perspective on Microsoft, and find out more about what drives others to want to work for my employer. I've been working for Microsoft on-and-off for long enough now that I have lost all independent perspective on why people might not want to work for Microsoft, or, moreover, what their reservations would be. So, thanks again to everyone who came by our booth to drop off a resume. I also wanted to mention one other important thing: we really do look at every resume that passes into our hands. I know that a lot of people are of the mindset that emailing a resume to a jobs address at a company means that your resume is as good as ignored. This is really not true in the case of Microsoft. So, if you are still in school and you didn't have a chance to drop off your resume when we came to town (or if we just didn't come, period), please do email your resume to us. We will look at it.

Work was so nuts for me this week because I missed all-day Monday, and I didn't even get back to Seattle until the wee hours of Tuesday morning. This messed up all of Tuesday and most of Wednesday for me. So, functionally, I only really worked two full days this week. So much for getting that full, necessary work week in. I have enough to do that I will probably end up working for a good part of the weekend to catch up. Nevertheless, I am incredibly excited about the projects I am working on right now. Whidbey will be really cool!

Seattle Area Blog Meetup

aaronbrethorst — Wed, 21 Jan 2004 08:09:00 GMT

Tonight, Wed. January 21 2004 @ 7pm.

Leilani Lanes 10201 Greenwood Ave N Seattle.

U of Minnesota/IEEE Career Fair

aaronbrethorst — Mon, 19 Jan 2004 01:36:00 GMT

This is just a head's up to any students at the University of Minnesota (or other schools in the Twin Cities): the U of MN's IEEE student group is sponsoring a career fair a week from tomorrow (which would make it Monday, January 26) at the McNamara Alumni Center (the big copper building on the corner of Oak and University). Microsoft will have a booth there, and I will be one of a couple of U of MN alumni on-hand to answer questions and take resumes from any students interested in internships and full-time positions. So, please come armed with a resume, and really grueling, tough questions about Microsoft for me!

About Me

aaronbrethorst — Fri, 09 Jan 2004 03:06:00 GMT

About Me: I work for Microsoft. I'm a Program Manager on the Visual Studio Core team. Specifically, I work on Core IDE functionality.

Which means what? Basically, I'm responsible for ensuring cross-suite user interface consistency and accessibility, among other things.

Given the opportunity, I'll use this blog for discussing a variety of Visual Studio-related topics. Feel free to leave comments on what you'd like to hear about. If possible, please keep them to UI related topics, since that's what I am most familiar with. There are certainly limits to what I can discuss on some things (i.e. Whidbey), but I will answer whatever I can. a.