My blog has moved to http://www.BaliOnWeb.com . Most of articles are also moved to new site. This is retired at this moment.

Finally, I delivered my first talk. Kind of excited, you can imagine. :-) PPT can be found @ http://cid-0c5963e0b1a0be5d.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/Public/PM%20Talk.ppt Let me know what you think of it. Update 7/30/2009 This post has been moved...

All great designs come from deep understanding to customers. In my case, I'd like to design the email service for information workers(IW) as I am one of them. Basically they are hired to get things done. Modern projects, or tasks in smaller granularity...

Nowadays software is getting so complex that it needs incredibly more and more people to build it. For example, there are 9000 engineers working on Vista simultaneously. In certain sense, you can call that it is a labor-intensive industry. Ideally, it...

Fast Company recently published its version of the world’s top 50 most innovative companies. Although I would question why Intel is among top10, what surprised me most is the fact that Hulu is listed #3. I know there might be political things about the...

As to the complexity level of problems, developers in Microsoft, who deal with coding, are probably taking one of the most challenging jobs in the world. But another engineering role, program manager, is not easier in any sense. Before I explain why,...

Today I got a mail from lakequincy.com , saying: “Hi Bill, I noticed that you were never able to plug the Lake Quincy Media ad tags into your site. Are you still interested in earning revenue from displaying ads targeted to Microsoft developers...

This is also one of my half-completed ideas years ago. It was recalled recently by two stories: Stories #1 : One of my team mates lost his Outlook email archive due to a mistaken operation. He is very upset because all of his emails in past two...

Memory leaks are always headache of developers. Do .NET developers no longer bother to worry about memory leaks because of garbage collection? Yes and NO. GC periodically find objects that cannot be accessed in the future and then reclaim the resources...

In my MSDN blog, I need “Recent Posts”, but I don’t need archive side bar. After having played with template for a while, still no luck. Hmmm, looks like I have to DIY it. Fortunately in News sidebar, you can fill in raw html including JavaScript . Then...

Run into the algorithm problem long time ago. Now post my answer here. A sorted array, say: {1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12}, do right rotate through carry unknown times, and then it might become: {6,7,8,9,10,11,12,1,2,3,4,5}. Now we need get the index of...

Cuil , another so-called Google killer, is at its last gasp . I just knew it. I am not predicting present. Cuil is not the first one, and apparently not the last. For upcoming cuils, here are my words. Brand. Brand. Brand. For many people, word...

What I am talking about in this post might be well known to many people(too simple, sometimes naive?), but often most basic things make a difference. OK, get down to business. Thumbs rules for DB security might be: Define your security boundary...

Hi, my dear friends, Happy New Chinese Year! First of all, a small quiz to you: Can you guess what it means? Let me explain it a bit. The pic is actually a Chinese word 福 written in a piece of square-shaped paper, and then rotate 180 degree. 福 means...

Back to not too long ago, I had a half-completed advertising idea related to social shopping. Now I post it here to collect more feedbacks. I call it HappyDog. (Just a name, not related to that DogFood widely used within Microsoft J ) Problems As...

It is only customers who pay dollars as your revenue and enable your read this post comfortably at your office. Almost every company considers “Customer-oriented” as one of their key values although they can be expressed in various ways. It is “ Passion...

Basically, window app UI, either WPF or traditional WinForm, is single threaded, which means only one thing can happen in the UI at any given time. To be specific, it is not generally possible to create an object on one thread, and access it from another...

We often need to know a given object’s all properties at run time, for example, tracking a data container object’s properties changes across different components. Here is a simple helper class you can use to do this magic. namespace Helper...

In my previous post, I mentioned that I will write an article about adding a new column to your inbox. Here you go! What we will achieve Quite simple. Take a look at below screenshot and you will notice that a new column, SubjectLength , is added...

In this post, I’d like to talk about certain basics for Outlook 2007 starter programmers. Outlook 2007 is shipped with enhanced programmability in various ways. Looking at Outlook Object Model Reference , new users are often confused by terms such as...

In this post, I’d like to illustrate the power of LINQ with code sample. I query the web service published by eBay. Refer to this article about eBay API concepts. EbayItem.cs namespace LINQ2EbayResponse { class EbayItem ...

It is Facebook’s heyday probably. Every tiny breath of Facebook will attract lots of discussion and review among major media and tech blog. It is successful to some extent if you don’t care its current sheet too much. But can we mirror Facebook’s popularity...

Some of my best friends complaint that my blog was over technical for them. With customer-oriented spirit and inspired by Socct Berkun's the Myths of Innovation , I composed this eye-catching-titled post talking about how to innovate and influence people...

From time to time, we run into the scenarios of adding new columns to existing table with millions of records to meet emerging business needs. And these new columns often need initialized with default value. In this post, I’d like to illustrate my solution...

In this post, I’d like to discuss one interesting algorithm problem which took me quite a while to find an ideal solution. The problem is as followings: Array A and B are sorted with length of m and n respectively. Try to select median of the two arrays...