AdamU's WebLog

Will it Blend? That is the question!

2007-02-01T22:47:00Z

We're having fun watching the BlendTec commercials since we've announced that the product code named Sparkle is now Blend.

Since my last post 6 months ago in July where I visited a company in Raleigh NC, I've been amazingly busy.

I've visited Roxio in Santa Clara, CA.
I've done a recruiting trip to U Penn in Philly
I've done a recruiting trip to Shanghai

Most importantly, I've shipped the Interactive Designer Sep CTP, the Blend Beta 1 in Dec, the Blend Beta 1 Japanese in Dec, and the Blend Beta 2 in Jan.

I hope that everyone that's seen Beta1 and Beta2 come away with how deeply the product team cares about quality, and how hard we're working on delivering a great user experience. If you've visited the sparkle/blend newgroup, I hope that you understand that the majority of people answering your questions are people who've been working for years on building this product, and that they love hearing how you are trying to use the product, and are anxious to take your issues and try to resolve them.

We've got two more big milestones coming soon to hit for Blend: RC1, and English RTM. And then the RTM for an additional 8 languages (German, Japanese, French, Italian, Spanish, Korean, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese). For me personally, I've also got two more recruiting trips planned in the next 3 weeks: MIT and CalTech.

So I'll likely be scarce for a while, again, but only because I'm working hard on hiring great people, and driving us to completion on a great product for Pro Designers to build rich compelling UI experiences.We fixed almost 700 bugs between Beta 1 and Beta 2. We added a couple key features that we were missing.

Adam

on the Frontline

2006-07-05T00:26:00Z

Two weeks ago, I spent an entire week at a customer site. This customer is in Raleigh, NC, and I got to see their early progress on a WPF prototype. They see the User Experience opportunities with WPF as a key differentiator in their market.

This opportunity came about because of a program that the Server and Tools Business within Microsoft runs, called Frontline. This program is why I spent the week with our Customer Support organization in April in Texas.

We always try to look for win win situations. In the Frontline case, I think that this program is a true win-win. I get to see first hand how customers see their business, and what excites them and frustrates them about Microsoft technologies. They get to have someone from the product development group in their office to answer questions (or at least put them in contact with those who can answer their questions), vet their plans, and provide a deeper glimpse within Microsoft.

I had a great experience in Raleigh and I am excited about future customer visits.

June CTPs now available

2006-07-05T00:20:00Z

We've made available new CTPs of Expression Interactive Designer and Graphic Designer that work with the June CTP of the .Net Fx 3.0. Links are below.

Interactive Designer

Graphic Designer

That's right, you're not from Texas, but Texas wants you anyway

2006-04-25T06:15:00Z

With apologies to Lyle Lovett....

I'm spending this week in Texas; specifically, at Microsoft's Las Colinas Customer Support Center in Irving, Tx. Now why in the world would I do that, voluntarily? Well, I'll tell you...

Each year as I review my performance, I look at ways I can improve. Everyone at Microsoft should do this, and most people I know here do a healthy amount of introspection during review time. Normally, you take a look around at training and work experience opportunities, and choose 1 or 2 that you'd like to do this year. The last couple of years I'd been choosing people manager training opportunities. This year I wanted to do something different. In my first 6 years at Microsoft, I'd worked on components that shipped in VB5 and VB6, Visual Interdev 1.0 and 6.0, SQL 7.0, as well as Office Developer 9.5 and 10. But I have been working on Expression since July 2002, and it's been a long time since I've truly 'walked in the customers shoes'.

So here I am in Texas, and I'm going to spend a week here, building a relationship with my product's Customer Support Engineers, listening to calls, understanding their workflow, with the goal of bringing back to my group more customer focus.

March CTP of Interactive Designer now available

2006-03-10T07:34:00Z

enjoy!

http://blogs.msdn.com/expression/archive/2006/03/09/543851.aspx

recruiting at Syracuse U

2006-03-07T04:37:00Z

I went to Syracuse a little over a week ago to recruit for Microsoft. Since I started on the Sparkle project nearly 4 years ago, I've had the opportunity to go to Shanghai, Romania, Bulgaria, U-Penn twice, Duke, Carnegie Mellon, Va Tech, UCLA, USC, Arizona, Texas A&M, Purdue, and Florida, and I've done phone interviews with candidates from Waterloo and Ohio State. I enjoy meeting bright students with passion for technology, I do enjoy traveling, and college recruiting is one part of my strategy on building a great team.

Syracuse had surprisingly little snow for mid Feb. Having lived in the area 15 years ago (I've lived in 16 states, so no surprise that I lived near there, huh?), I was prepared for feet of snow. Instead, you could actually see grass, and the roads were all clear.

We invited the students to a pizza dinner on Sunday evening, and I was a little tired after flying from Seattle to Dulles, and then to Syracuse, but 30 minutes after we got to the hotel, we were in a room with about 40 students answering their questions about Microsoft, the recruiting process, etc. Unfortunately, we screwed up, and we only order pepperoni pizza, and I think half the people there were vegetarians. Anyone who was there, I apologize for the mix-up, and we'll do better next time.

Monday and Tuesday we conducted interviews for about 40 students. I went on this trip with 2 leads who had never been on one of these types of recruiting trips before, so I spent time observing them (and them observing me) and providing feedback. Wednesday was the long flight via Dulles back home to Seattle.

One thing I've never been able to coordinate on one of these trips was attending a sports event. I was at Purdue when they were playing Notre Dame during football season, but my flight left in the middle of the game. I was at Arizona, but they were on the road. Texas A&M, but they were over in Waco. At Duke, but they were on the road that week. But this time, Syracuse was hosting West Virginia in basketball, and WV was ranked in the top 10. So Monday evening after a day of interviews, I walked up to the Carrier Dome, paid $10 over face value outside the stadium, and got a seat 6 rows behind the Syracuse bench. The place was rocking, and it was alot of fun. I have to say, thought, the Carrier Dome is really not a great basketball facility. Syracuse upset WV 60-58, and the home fans went home very happy.

What's the difference between SDE and SDET at microsoft?

2006-01-27T23:39:00Z

I was exchanging email with a candidate last night who was confused about the differences between what dev and test do at microsoft, and as I tried to compose my thoughts about what it is that SDETs do, I thought that it would be good to share this on my blog.

You can envision the SDET job in two vectors, one in feature work, another in tools work. We have a product to test, and we need to eliminate defects, so we spend time in both proactive and reactive activities to help PMs specify the right thing, as well as validating what it is that our SDE counterparts built. Here’s the typical workflow for the feature work we do.

Feature Work

PM writes a spec for a feature. PM, SDET, and SDE sit down and discuss the feature, make changes and get general agreement on the spec.
SDET takes the spec, writes a test spec based on it, describing the testing in general terms. The test spec also defines an object model that you can think of as an API to the feature.
PM, SDE, and SDET sit down and discuss the feature spec and test spec, and agree that the OM defined by test is correct.
SDE begins to implement the feature
SDET implements the OM, and then starts writing tests against the OM.
As features come online
1. SDE and SDET together run tests agasinst the feature (manual, automated, and writing unit tests).
2. SDET does adhoc buddy testing against the feature to get more testing done before check-in.
Post code complete, SDE fixes bugs.
Post code complete, SDET analyzes automated test failures.

While there’s a lot to get excited about in both jobs (I can’t believe they are actually paying me to do what I do in my spare time for fun!) there’s drudgery in both jobs. Test case writing, automation analysis, and adhoc testing for the 1000^th time can be mind numbing, but fixing bugs for a months at a time is equally as painful.

Tools Work

To extend our existing automation infrastructure, or to do testing in additional vectors, we build test tools. Lots of them. Test Labs can have 100s of machines, and if we’ve written the tests correctly, we can determine the current quality of the build far more efficiently than with manual testing. So while we do some manual testing, the focus is on building test automation that can be used milestone to milestone, release to release. Obviously, the quality of the tests and test infrastructure is super important. As the saying goes, who tests the tests, and who tests the tests that test the tests? Tests that don’t test properly can give false positives, and can actually be worse than no test at all because of the false sense of security they encourage. And infrastructure that is poorly designed will give you big problems as you approach v2, v3, etc., as well as sustained engineering efforts on your currently released products. So we have code reviews for every checkin, and we have design reviews for all tool work.

Some of these tools we created, some we took a snapshot of the code from other teams and make our own modifications, others are shared amongst many teams. Here is a list of some of the tools we build to test:

lab, machine and run management – infrastructure that drives our test automation in our test labs. Machine re-imaging and configuration, automated logins and installs of pre-reqs, fail/pass reporting, run management, machine allocation, etc.
test harness that allows for functional tests or unit tests to be executed. Builds test binaries and reports pass fail results to the run management system.
Team libraries – we build tons of our own libraries: for my team, we divide them like this
- Physical OM
- Logical OM
- Internals OM – we build add-ins into the product to get at internal data structures to determine current state \
- Extensions to those OMs to help us write fewer numbers of tests that test more of the product, and lower maintenance through ideas like
  - systematic variation of common data and behaviors
  - loosely coupling test execution and test verification to make verification more comprehensive and reusable
  - pairwise testing tools for combinatorial testing
Buddy build tools that Allows SDEs to run specific sets of tests on their desktops (or offload it to the lab and send them an email with the results) before checkin.
Basic UI automation libraries - we take these building blocks and build our Physical OM.
Static Analysis for
- security
- style guidelines
- common bugs on looping/branching
Code Coverage/Branch Analysis
quality dashboard - Web portals that track key metrics
- Code coverage
- Test automation pass/fail rates
- Bug Stats: Current total defects, defects per developer, incoming defect rate, fix rate, regression rate.
- Code base size
- performance
Auto-analysis tools
Performance Testing tools
Stress / mean time to failure testing
watson crash bucket analysis

When I think about SDE vs SDET, what I tell folks is that:

You are better suited to be an SDE if
- you like to get really deep in one technology space for long stretches
- you don’t stop until you write the perfect algorithm, or the most elegant code
You are better suited to be an SDET if
- You like system integration type work:
  - you take the technology that this team did, make use of it and tie it to this other piece of technology, etc.
- You may have been a TA and graded other peoples code, or were the guy in group projects who enjoyed and was good at poking holes in other peoples designs
- You have strong big picture thinking, and are focusing your energy on solving the whole problem.
  - You find yourself coming up with “good enough” solutions to problems. Your solutions may or may not be elegant or perfect, but you are happy with it and you’ve moved on to the next part of the problem.

So I describe the SDE problem space as more narrow and deep, and the SDET problem space as broader, not as deep. Some SDETs have more penchant for tool building, less for feature work, or the other way around.. In my group, I try to balance between both of them so that we get smart people thinking about the hard problems within feature work, giving them good cross functional exposure and scope of influense, and still mixing in a healthy amount of tools work. Other teams (many I've been on in the past) structure it differently, but my personal feeling is that this balance gives people the right amount of both for healthy career development.

Expression Interactive Designer - Now available!

2006-01-24T12:13:00Z

It's been a work in progress for what seems like a lifetime... But as of right now we FINALLY have a build of Expression Interactive Designer (EID) available for public download. We've also updated Expression Graphic Designer with a new XAML exporter. You can find both here:

http://www.microsoft.com/expression

Windows Live Local - Virtual Earth

2006-01-14T06:12:00Z

I was playing around with Virtual Earth on Windows Live Local, and they've recently added a bird's eye view to the mapping software. Here's a bird's eye view of my building on the Microsoft campus.

http://local.live.com/default.aspx?v=2&cp=47.639567~-122.133399&style=o&lvl=2&scene=3729997

Christmas Presents and teams long since past

2005-12-29T11:20:00Z

I went to a White Elephant gift exchange with about 20 other people about 2 weeks ago. What was unusual was that this was with people who were on my very first team here at Microsoft, over 9 years ago. We hadn't had a daVinci team function in a long time, and it was great seeing people that I rarely get to interact with anymore. In fact, we had people who had retired from Microsoft or moved on to other companies come back for the function. I hope that it's not another 7+ years before I can get together with one of the funnest group of people I've ever had the pleasure of working with. The hallway nerf wars, the office decorations while people were out of the office, along with building a really great piece of software that still ships in various forms in SQL Server, VS, and Office nearly a decade since it's inception was an awesome first experience at Microsoft. I think the biggest things I took away from that experience were:

you can work hard and have fun at the same time.
building today's highly complex software, by its very scope, must be a collaborative effort, and team building is an important part of facilitating that collaboration.

And that leads me on to my second point. There were some neat presents at the gift exchange, and I ended up taking home some european chocolate; which was a top 10 gift, definitely. But what I wanted most was the new Mr. Potato Head Darth Tater, but alas, it was not in the luck of the draw for me to end up with it.

I mentioned this Darth Tater to my kids, and of course, I ended up with Darth Tater under the tree, which was pretty cool. See, my kids figure that if they get me a toy, they will get to play with it at my office when they spend the day with me, which, since we homeschool our kids, is a few times a year (way more than I spent time with my dad at his job). Thus I've gotten Star Wars lego sets, hot wheels cars, etc. over the years from the kids.

So when I mentioned it to the kids, I knew that one of them was bound to get it for me, and they didn't disappoint. I really thought it was pretty cool. But what was so suprising (and thus blog-able) was that I not only got Darth Tater, but I also got a SpudTrooper potato head! What's next? Princess Lay's? Luke Frywalker?

Greetings from Shanghai

2005-11-09T22:12:00Z

I was in Shanghai last week to interview candidates for Microsoft, and got a day to do a little sightseeing. Shanghai is a pretty neat city!

What is Acrylic For?

2005-10-27T08:36:00Z

Andrew Watt, an infopath MVP asked, "What exactly is Acrylic for?"

Acrylic is intended for pro designers (people who use today's pro design tools) to create rich visual content, primarily for use in user interfaces, either desktop apps or web apps, although for the pure artist it's also an excellent tool. It's target audience is not developers or hobbyists or information workers, so these folks may be initially frustrated attempting to use the tool because of their lack of familiarity with this class of tool.

Whether the pro designer primarily uses vector tools or bitmap tools, Acrylic will enable them to create designs combining the best of both.

Acrylic does overlap somewhat with some existing pro designer tools, but I think it is more complementary than anything. If you are an artist, you can use Acrylic, and you'll have a blast just drawing stuff. It's variation palette, among other things, makes this an amazing experience. But the core focus for Acrylic is in areas that are fairly unique, because Acrylic's uber-goal is to help designers become more deeply integrated into the application development process. Acrylic has the ability to output XAML, which can be used as the UI for an application. In todays typical workflow, a designer uses a design tool to prototype the UI, and throws it over a wall to a developer, who attempts to implement the UI in code, but the developer may miss nuances in the design, or it may take too much time to get it just the way the designer wants, and much of the aesthetic appeal of the design can be lost. With Acrylic's XAML export, developers can use the designer's full content in the application interface; no need to attempt to recreate it.

Adam

Sparkle Video Link

2005-09-23T09:34:00Z

In case you missed the Sparkle Video on Channel 9, here's the link: http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=115387

And the NorthFace Concept Video: http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=116327

You've Got Questions, I've got Answers... Part 2

2005-09-22T11:47:00Z

OK, here's your chance. Blast away. I did this last year, and got lots of questions from people about how hiring and recruiting works at Microsoft, as well as some test questions.

So, what would you like to know? Something about Sparkle? Or Acrylic? Something about testing at microsoft? Or more on hiring and recruiting?

Here's an Acrylic stitched picture I took during an August camping trip to the Mt St Helens area. The mountain to the left missing it's right (northerly) side, is Mt. St. Helens. The lake that is now 200 feet higher than it was 25 years ago is Spirit Lake. Yep, the bottom of the lake is where the side of the mountain is now.

Sparkle and AdamU

2005-09-15T07:12:00Z

Well, given that we (finally!) announced today (at PDC) the project I've been working on for the last 3 years, I can now put in my blog that I've been working on "Sparkle Interactive Designer". You can check it out here. And yes, if you get a chance to use it in the coming months, or you want to, I want to hear all about how much you love it, hate it, how it could be better, and where we are missing the boat (especially on quality).

Haven't posted much during the last 60 days, as during August and September, I've travelled a lot. August, we went camping at Mt Hood, and at Mt St Helens, and I did a 2nd trip to Beijing. I put 700 miles on my motorcycle (and 2000 miles in an airplane) during one very busy weekend. I'm currently in LA, doing our annual visit of my mom and step-dad. We have a lot of fun; visiting with my mom and sister is great, and my 5 boys turn into fish and spend alot of time in her pool, and we go to disneyland. I think we are still going to try and get one final camping trip in later this month too.

Speaking of Disneyland, the reopened space mountain rocks! A lot faster, and a lot darker. We did it twice! And the 50th anniversary special fireworks at the end of the day were great, highlighting the coolest rides in the park. The fireworks for 'pirates' was awesome. But the best part is being there with no really long lines. We didn't spend more than 20 minutes in any line, and most were walk right on to 5 minutes.

I think that I'll include a picture from each of my travels in my blog entries over the coming few months. Here's a picture of Mt Hood from Lost Lake Butte, a 2.5 mile hike from Lost Lake gaining about 1500 feet in elevation. Pictured are my father in law, my youngest son Jackson (4), my oldest, Aaron (16), my 2nd son, Garrison (12), and me.