amivora's WebLog

All Good Things

MSDNArchive — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 19:19:00 GMT

Hey folks – like all good things, this too comes to an end. Today is my last day at Microsoft. It’s been a great ride, but it’s time for me to see what’s next. I plan to spend the next few months traveling (reacquainting myself with sunlight and big-city life :) ) before deciding exactly where to settle and what to do next. I’m sorry to be leaving such a great team, but excited to travel and try out new things. It has been so much fun working with the WCF and other .NET Framework 3.0 teams, and I’ve been lucky to work with incredibly smart, passionate people both inside and outside the company.

It’s a surprisingly small world, so you might see me pop up again later. Until next time,

Cheers,

native Vista awesomeness

MSDNArchive — Tue, 21 Nov 2006 10:01:00 GMT

I’ve been asked a few times lately about what’s developers should find cool about Vista besides the .NET Framework 3.0, and I figured I should post my response here too. I can’t say enough good stuff about the native APIs in Vista – we’ve been pretty busy talking about the .NET Framework 3.0, but the native APIs deserve serious love as well. You’ve probably already heard that there are 7000 new native APIs in Vista. Here are my favorite features:

Sidebar: The Windows Vista Sidebar Gadgets platform lets you create a variety of customizable mini-applications that offer users information at a glance. You can use JavaScript and DHTML to create rich gadgets that have access to the entire Vista platform, so you can keep your users in touch with the information they want.
P2P / People Near Me: The Vista P2P platform includes powerful native APIs that help you build peer-to-peer applications. The functionality in the Vista platform takes care of the infrastructure for discovery, connection, and communication between applications, whether we’re talking about two parties or on a multi-party mesh. The P2P functionality transparently plugs into DNS, so peers can easily find and communicate with each other across the internet. And the People Near Me feature locates other users on the same Internet access point. The platform can even create an ad-hoc network directly between users who aren’t connected to the Internet. (This – provisioning an ad-hoc wireless network between users who aren’t already connected to an access point – is one of the coolest bits of technology I can remember seeing. It’s so cool that I initially didn’t believe the demos.)
RSS Platform: the RSS platform (also available as part of the IE7 download) lets you build RSS-enabled applications without rewriting the basic building blocks of RSS infrastructure. The Common Feed List, Feed Synchronization Engine, and Feed Store in Windows Vista give you support for all major ATOM and RSS formats, background scheduled updates, and APIs that expose a simple object model for feeds. Including RSS support in your application has never been easier.
Integrated Search: On Vista, you can programmatically enable users to set properties on files they save. Through Integrated Search, a user can then search on those properties using the Vista Common File Dialog. You can also write handlers for your file types that plug into the Live Icons thumbnail viewer in Integrated Search, which give users a look at what’s inside the file they’re looking for – the first screen of a video, the first slide in a deck, etc.
User Account Control (UAC): As part of our commitment to security, UAC notifies users when an application is going to take an action which requires administrative privileges, and requires users to elevate their privileges with admin credentials in order to run the application. This helps protect the user against a host of malware attacks. You can embed a manifest in your applications that will cause Windows Vista to automatically prompt the user to elevate her credentials. This helps you keep your users safer, whether they’re at home or in the office.

And that’s just scratching the surface. There’s more stuff in Parental Controls, Crypto Next Generation Services, etc etc. It’s really pretty remarkable.

wooo!

MSDNArchive — Sat, 11 Nov 2006 04:19:00 GMT

That’s right, folks – we’ve finally shipped. In fact, we’ve shipped more or less everything – Vista, Office, and of course the .NET Framework 3.0. It’s officially a trifecta. I’m so glad we’ve finally got everything out there into customers’ hands. Of course, the technology is just the beginning – now we have to focus on guidance, best practices in production environments, etc. We’ve given people a whole lot of great technology, but we also have to make sure they know how to use it.

As you can imagine, it’s been an exciting week here at TechEd Barcelona. I’ve spent most of my week with European press folks, which is very different from talking with American press folks. Talking to press is so much fun – it always keeps you on your toes. I’m betting there’s some serious celebration going on back at Redmond (and hopefully around the world), but I think we’re doing okay over here as well.

Barcelona is just as beautiful as I remember; I just wish I spoke Catalan (or that there were at least an English à Catala phrasebook available) so I could take full advantage of it. In the meantime, I’m going to take a couple of days around the city before I head back to the office.

If you’re looking for more info on what the .NET Framework 3.0 and Vista bring for developers, I’d also suggest you check out Channel9, which is running an informal “Week of Windows Vista Development” including .NET Framework 3.0 content. It kicked off with the announce of the Vista RTM with Jim Allchin, and the first Vista show covers UAC with more shows coming up. http://netfx3.com also has updates, and keep your eyes open for more coming soon!

I hope you’re all enjoying the release as much as we are J .

surrounded by women

MSDNArchive — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 03:49:00 GMT

I spent some time a couple weeks ago (my, how time flies) at the Grace Hopper Conference in San Diego. Rear Admiral Grace Hopper was a pioneering female computer scientist, the woman who popularized the term “bug” – I’ve seen the Mark IV in Cambridge, one of the computers she worked on, and I remember being fascinated by the picture of the moth in the works of the Mark II. The Grace Hopper Conference is the “Celebration of Women in Computing”, run by the Anita Borg Institute, and I was going on behalf of Microsoft Research’s Gender Equity team to talk about Microsoft and (for my own edification) to take a look at the current state of women in technology. I filled the same role at the last conference in 2004, and it was amazing to me how much better the conference has gotten. The sponsorship, the speakers, the attendance – everything just gets better each year. This year we were up to (I think) 1500 attendees.

It’s always odd for me to go to these women’s events. The demographics, as you might imagine, look very different from those at the other conferences I go to, and having to wait in a line for the bathroom is almost a novelty. I hold such a complicated position toward the idea of “women in computing” that I’m sometimes confused by it myself. When I was young and naïve, I more or less believed that everyone should have access to the single level playing field and no one should need “extra help”; after a few years in the industry I decided that the playing field is neither single nor level and that underrepresented folks need all the help they can get. These were difficult points for me to reconcile initially, but I’m now comfortable with the ambiguity.

The really hard problem, afaict, is one of execution.

You know, there was more to follow up that sentence, but in writing this I realized I haven’t recently thought about the problem rigorously. I’ve been involved in a lot of one-on-one discussions about the issue, and I think the other person has usually walked away agreeing that my position is valid (which may partially be because I’ve been making them swallow lots of alcohol while listening to me), but I haven’t tried to put it down on paper in a while. I’ll have to think more about this and follow up.

(as an aside, while I was in lovely, sunny San Diego, I had dinner with Michele Leroux Bustamante, who’s writing a great book on WCF. It's always good to see our community, and it's almost surprising how someone from the community turns up just about everywhere I go. Michele also pointed me to some beautiful beaches, so I managed to fulfill my beachgoing duty.)

Firefox and IE

MSDNArchive — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 06:01:00 GMT

It's things like this that make me happy to be in this industry.

(I know, I'm late to the game, but I've been half-writing posts and never getting to post them lately -- rather like my million drafted mails that have slowly become too irrelevant to ever send...)

back to today (and RC1)

MSDNArchive — Thu, 21 Sep 2006 02:10:00 GMT

And that brings us to…RC1. That’s right, over Labor Day Weekend we published the release candidate for both Windows Vista and the .NET Framework 3.0. (What was I doing between TechEd and Labor Day, you ask? That’s where all that beach time comes in.) The biggest indication this gives is that we’re so close to shipping. A lot of us have been working on this for a long, long time, and I can’t wait for the euphoria when we finally get it out the door. My colleague Paul Andrew has a great guide to installing the bits.

And that might just bring us up to date. So what will happen? Will I keep this blog up to date in better than my my usual dilatory fashion? Will it add anything to the cacophony of blog noise already out there? I’m not one for promises, but maybe the suspense will keep you coming back (or at least stop you from pulling the feed out of your aggregator)…

Renaming + TechEd

MSDNArchive — Thu, 21 Sep 2006 02:07:00 GMT

Ah yes, the renaming of WinFX to the .NET Framework 3.0. By now it’s been so long that the new name seems completely natural. I think Soma’s blog post says it all, and we really think this will be the best choice for our customers longterm. We’re not denying there’s some short-term pain, but we’re in this developer business of the long haul. Of course, this meant that I spent much of my time at TechEd US in Boston (ah, lovely Boston) plugged into an Ethernet port, trying to get together some information to mitigate that short-term pain. You can find a whitepaper on .NET Framework 3.0 deployment and a Q&A about the renaming on MSDN, as well as Jason Zander’s Channel9 video explaining the change.

Aside from that TechEd was good – a little quieter this year than most, I think, and I’ve heard varying theories as to why. We also launched the new http://netfx3.com community site, combining the existing windowscommunication.net and windowsworkflow.net sites, plus adding new functionality. Lots of work, but well worth it. The evangelism group manager James Conard was really the driving force behind this, so all kudos should go to him.

WinFX Beta2

MSDNArchive — Thu, 21 Sep 2006 02:05:00 GMT

Then came Beta2, which was exciting. I love releases, because we can finally get our latest bits in the hands of customers. (Of course, “latest” is only in a manner of speaking – given all the stabilization work we do on the bits, there’s a significant delay between when we develop them and when we release them publicly.) As you can imagine, this leads to all sorts of fun.

At Beta2 release (at WinHEC), when we released the Beta2 of Office, Windows Vista + WinFX, and Longhorn Server, I got to sit down with a bunch of journalists and talk to them about the technology. It’s always intriguing to see what they’re interested, as a lot of those journalists are looking across a broad span of Microsoft technologies, and the questions they ask often reflect the questions our customers have. I did a PressPass that captures how I think of the technology – I’d love to hear what you think.

WinFX EMEA tour

MSDNArchive — Thu, 21 Sep 2006 02:02:00 GMT

I then got to go on the road for the EMEA (that’s Europe, the Middle East, and Africa for those of you playing along) WinFX roadshow! I had quick stop in London, then kicked off the tour in Rotterdam, and followed it up with a few talks in Nice. Yes, it’s a rough life. You can watch the kickoff show we did in Rotterdam (it’s split into two videos). That might’ve been the most last-minute talk I’ve given lately (my co-presenter had to bow out 24 hours before the show, my laptop utterly failed 20 minutes before, etc) and we were all a little stressed, but we had a great audience and managed to have some fun (though I confess all of us were very tired after the talk). One of the most fun things I did on the trip (well, relating to work) was talking to students at some Dutch universities. Two very kind and very patient guys from the Microsoft Amsterdam office drove me around the Amsterdam area, chauffeuring me between talks and showing me the lovely Dutch countryside. And the seven hours I spent sitting in traffic on that single day certainly makes it difficult to complain about traffic in the Puget Sound.

MIX06

MSDNArchive — Thu, 21 Sep 2006 02:00:00 GMT

After the February CTP (and even before, I guess), it was time to start getting everything together for MIX06. Steve Maine and I worked on a “Sites as Services” talk given by Clemens Vasters explaining how WCF lets you expose your content (aka your web site) over a host of different transports and formats, so that all the clients who access your content will have an optimized experience. All the sessions are now online, so you can watch Clemens give the talk from the comfort and safety of your own home.

I love this message. Steve’s been doing rockstar work to make WCF work for the full spectrum of web scenarios – whether you’re using POX or SOAP or WS-* compliant messages, WCF gives you more flexibility and maximum reach for your site and the best experience for your clients. Awesome.