I've been posting some comments about Indigo on my other blog - feel free to subscribe if you're interested in Indigo. Here are some of the Indigo entries I've written: http://galactic-patrol.blogspot.com/2005/02/indigo-is-re-released-into-wild.html http://galactic-patrol.blogspot.com/2005/02/to-indigo...

This is the story of an inspirational speech that, well – wasn’t. I went to a divisional meeting recently – lots of people, lots of powerpoint. The topics were a bit dry, and the last speaker was clearly trying to drum up some excitement and enthusiasm. He started telling us a story...

I made the following challenge over on Channel 9 – anyone care to take up the gauntlet? “That takes me back - when I started at Microsoft eight years ago, I worked in the Windows build lab. This was back when we were working on SUR, and IIS 1.0. We used SLM instead of SD, and there were...

Wow, Pat Helland is blogging – that’s too cool. Update: for those who don't know of Pat - he is very knowledgeable about distributed architecture issues, and also has a wonderful way of explaining them. If you ever get a chance to hear him talk, I recommend it. Recently, for example, he...

I published this info when I started my GotDotNet blog ; with the move, now is a good time to re-present the info: Bruce Williams I am a test developer for Indigo – current and future Web Services technology at Microsoft. e-mail : bwill@microsoft.com IM: domanite@hotmail.com

Eric Lippert has a great post describing some of his adventures with security issues in VBScript.  I particularly liked this segment: “Of course, it could be worse.  There was a bug in early versions of the CLR (which I believe was fixed before the first beta shipped, fortunately)...

Peter’s response to my TiVo post for some reason reminded me of a rambling e-mail conversation I had several months ago; for your amusement I repeat it below.  Incidentally, mail threads like this are reason #128 why I like working at Microsoft… From: Ken Sent: Thursday, July 17...

In a response to my recent post on fault injection , Mark asks if I know of any publicly-available fault-injection frameworks.  Yes!  In fact, much of the fault-injection work done at Microsoft is built on top of work done by Microsoft Research, and you can also take advantage of their...

I noticed this link to Wesner Moise’s comments on Microsoft’s “Avalon” technology, to be debuted at PDC.  I’m certainly no Avalon expert, but I’ve been to their internal web site, and saw a demo once.  This is killer stuff.  Not wanting to be fired, I probably shouldn’t discuss it...

We have occasional debates here at Microsoft on the value of ‘white-box’ testing.  (For the sake of this discussion, ‘white-box’ testing means testing that takes advantage of internal product knowledge, while ‘black-box’ testing relies solely on the published API and behavior.) On the one...

I’d like to talk about one of the first lessons I learned as a tester at Microsoft: Anticipate failure investigations, and log everything. Let me tell you a fairly rambling tale of my early days at Microsoft: We’d just shipped Windows NT 4.0 (and IIS 1.0).  I’d recently moved from...

I’ve never been to an industry conference (yet; I keep trying to convince my management to send me…), but to my uneducated eye, this pre-flight PDC checklist by Adam Cartwright looks eminently useful… 

Again, while reading this same Scoble post , it got me thinking about my role at Microsoft.  When I tell people what I do at Microsoft, I say "I do software testing.  If you find a bug in a Microsoft product, it is my fault." Of course, that is a vast oversimplification.  I work...

I was reading this recent post on Scoble’s blog , where he talks about how he refers to “we” and “us” when talking about Microsoft.  A friend of mine told me once that they found it unusual that I say "we" and "us" when referring to stuff that Microsoft does. Apparently that isn't the habit...

Damn!  I just found out that the Microsoft Company Meeting, a yearly event, is on October 30 th , and I will be out of town!  Its hard to describe these meetings; but let me try. You walk into SafeCo field, Seattle’s new baseball stadium, and look around, admiring the sheer size of...

I noticed on meta-douglasp that some of our Indigo PMs are soliciting your input on a few issues; please take a look and let them know what you think! “ Serialization Surrogates :  If you are using surrogates in your application or framework, we want to hear from you.  We are closing...

I saw a question recently on an internal Microsoft alias, asking where old computers go when they are retired.  It turns out that Microsoft’s old computers (and those of other companies) end up at http://www.retrobox.com .  It looks like they have some great deals if you don’t need the latest...

 Ok, this is just awesome .  I just got mail about it; I’m not sure if its supposed to be public or not, but its on the public gotdotnet site, and its easier to get forgiveness than permission…  <grin> 

  Prologue One of my teammates recently set up a Wiki site for my team, and I must admit that I have become quite addicted to it.  One of the pages I’ve created has been a list of common test areas, a checklist of things most of our tests will want to concern themselves with. ...

 After the Indigo team's last milestone (M4), most of our feature test teams did an analysis of the bugs in their feature area, and extracted some useful 'lessons learned' to help us improve our testing in future milestones.  Here are some of the lessons we learned: 1.      ...

I’ve really been enjoying RaymondC’s blog posts on the history of Windows and the checkered past of its development.  Here is the one where he explains why Joe Schmoe developer isn’t allowed to add entries to the Start Menu pin list.

I’ve found this site where Ton Zijlstra is documenting his conversion from Windows to Linux.  I’ll be curious to see how it goes – of course, I hope he finds out that Windows is the better answer after all!  [Note that the website appears blank, but if you subscribe to the RSS feed...

I noticed at this link that folks are starting to hear (and speculate) about Indigo.  That’s cool to see, because that’s my team!  I know, I shouldn’t tease, because I’m not allowed to talk about it yet – but still, it is just cool to start getting some public recognition.  Even if...

Mark Pilgrim converts the new MS.COM web service into a REST format ; it is certainly more compact!  My team works mostly with SOAP, so I have a lot of intellectual investment in that approach; it is interesting and challenging to see other ways of implementing web services.

Ok, normally gratuitous anti-Microsoft writing turns me off, but this one is just hilarious! (Matrix's Morpheus speaking to Neo) “Microsoft Windows is a system, Neo. That system is our enemy. But when you're inside, you look around and what do you see? Businessmen, Teachers, Lawyers, Carpenters...