aaron's weblog

I've been really bad about posting for the past few weeks due to a huge number of deadlines. I want to apologize for being so bad about maintaining this weblog lately. I will be adding more consistency content over the coming weeks, so stay tuned for...

As a follow-up to Chad Royal's request for a picture and bio of Visual Studio users, I want to conduct my own little experiment here too. If you don't use Visual Studio today, let me know. I want to know more about who you are, why you don't use Visual...

Chad Royal, one of the Lead Program Managers on my team (and an all-around terrific guy), wants to get to know you better . As he put it, “ So tell me who you are and what you do with VS. Send me a picture. I'll print your picture, write your name...

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...

Let me tell a little story. Once upon a time (read: 2002-2003) while I was a senior in college I had to do an Advanced Project Laboratory , or, as the rest of the world refers to them, a senior design project. Somehow, I came upon the bright idea of porting...

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.”

Have you ever noticed how Office 2003, and a wide variety of modal dialogs throughout Windows XP and Windows 2003 Server use that little question mark button in the title bar to launch their F1 help system? It's rather neat, unobtrusive, and it allows...

I moderated a talk yesterday on accessibility at Microsoft. I think it went over pretty well. In any case, one of the central points I made during the talk bears repeating in a more public forum. Accessibility is not a feature. “Whoa, wait...

I just discovered that Scott Swanson , another Program Manager on VSCore, has started blogging. Scott manages the Help experience in Whidbey: everytime you hit F1 in Visual Studio, you're seeing some of the fruits of his labor. He's a great guy, well...

I've been thinking a lot lately about some best practices in making sure applications look and feel like 'real' Windows XP apps. This is one of those areas that is, in my opinion, undervalued at times, despite the fact that it really can make a huge difference...

Since I just started in the Visual Studio Core team in November 2003, I unfortunately haven't done that much work yet that has been released to the public. As we get closer to certain events (say, like Beta 1) I will start focusing more on Whidbey, and...

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...

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...

I just got to have dinner with a ton of our VSIP Partners in Bellevue this evening. To everyone I talked to tonight: thanks a lot for telling me about what you've been up to, and for offering your thoughts on what we can do better (and for those of you...

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...

Wow, Apple just completely redeemed themselves in my eyes with iTunes 4.2 on Windows. I've been trying to avoid reinstalling iTunes for a while now just because it makes me into a borderline psychotic to see a company that prides itself on design (Apple...

I got to hear a former Sony designer (also a veteran of Apple's HIG) talk at MS Research today. He had a lot of interesting things to say, and he had a few interesting anecdotes about verbal jousting with Ken Kutaragi, the guy who came up with PlayStation...

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...

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...

My occasional lunch companion/soon-to-be office mate, Alex Kipman, is featured on the latest episode of MSDN TV. You can check it out here . Kipman talks extensively here about our new build platform, MSBuild, and what makes it so cool. Random sidenote...

Tonight, Wed. January 21 2004 @ 7pm. Leilani Lanes 10201 Greenwood Ave N Seattle .

I just ran across a blog entry from David Hunter , who has been playing around with the PDC build of Whidbey. David was trying to create a web service after reading about Indigo, but discovered that his New Project menu item had completely disappeared...

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...

I just finished implementing a really bare-bones smartphone-compatible web-based RSS aggregator. Best feature: No typing in of feed Urls; just give it a single Url to an OPML file and you're good to go. Of course, typing in that sort of address is...

Omar Shahine reminded me today that NewsGator just announced a mobile version of their NewsGator aggregator. I've been a user of their product (version 1.3) for the past few months now, and I've been a huge fan. So, we'll see what happens with my work...