I'm sorry I haven't written anything in a while. For those who don't know me, I have transitioned to work on NTFS proper. It's fun, technical work, but it's also maintenance, something which just seems less exciting for a public audience. As a result...

One of the things on my list at the moment is to implement a field for how many milliseconds have passed since something happened. It sounds so simple, but from experience, dealing with time always makes me shudder. Consider the properties of electronic...

Today I read a newsgroup post by an academic at my former university, who I know reasonably well, and who I used to work for. In that post, he talks about things that Microsoft has done to him, and how he views Microsoft today; the fact that the subject...

I confess: I'm breaking the first rule of blogging and talking about something I know nothing - literally, nothing - about. When I first started this blog, lots of people were asking about Transactional Registry support. I guess somebody in MS agreed...

At the moment, I'm finding it really hard to concentrate on work, so I thought I'd share my thoughts with you. Readers of this blog will recall that I have an iMac, that I've done a fair bit of Apple development prior to moving to MS, and those...

Firstly, apologies for not updating this more frequently. I haven't wanted to post about things until they're bug-free, just to be certain I'm not talking about something that won't work for you. So far, I've shown transactional writers. In these...

Recently, The NT Insider published an article entitled Don't be Afraid to Commit -- The Transactional Filesystem (TxFS) in Windows . The article deserves mention for a number of reasons, mainly because it's a really good conceptual explanation of what...

Some time ago my manager told me that I'd be one of three people maintaining the Windows builds used in our group, and this week is when I'm supposed to do that. For those non-Microsofties, or at least, people outside the Windows group, Windows...

One of the things I've had to get used to at Microsoft is operating with cutting-edge code. By that I mean, somebody just changed it yesterday, new things are going in, plus fixes, and on such a large codebase, problems do happen. A couple of...

Yesterday I demonstrated how a Transaction can be inherited by processes. This means that a process never designed for Transactions can run in a Transacted mode. Clearly, this has profound implications. Some applications may exhibit odd or unexpected...

A strange thing happened to me yesterday. I went to install an OS X update to my iMac. The update failed midway through, and this left my machine in an unbootable state. The truth is that it could have been Windows, or a Windows product, that did the...

This question seemed so good I thought I'd answer it in a whole new blog post :) As always, it'd be great to see software developers impress me and find new uses for this technology that I haven't foreseen. I can't tell developers how to write...

I started here at Microsoft a little over three months ago. It's been an amazing transition from self-confessed "GNU hippy" to now, and has been more than a mild culture shock. The good news is that Seattle has far better weather than it's reputed to...