Calvin Hsia's WebLog

In my blog about Dr. Watson I talked about product crashes. What is an example of a crash? How destructive is it? Here’s a simple example. MyFunction takes a string parameter and calculates its length MyFunction ( char * StringParam...

In the old days, we had to use a typewriter. I asked if I could use the ASR-33 teletype machine which connected to our high school PDP-8 computer, but it only printed in UPPER CASE on rolls of yellow paper. Did you ever wonder the origin of the...

I bet you’ve seen dialogs similar to this: We at Microsoft refer to this dialog/technology as Dr. Watson (after the famous Sherlock Holmes assistant). Before Watson, computer users would get the BSOD (The Blue Screen of Death)...

We have heard a couple reports of strange behavior in Visual FoxPro if you click on a thumb button in a scrollbar, drag it up or down a little, then pause for 6 seconds or so. The contents of the window would disappear, leaving a blank editing window...

Here at Microsoft we have people called Program Managers (PMs) whose job is to design a product. They’re the ones that make a feature usable to the customer. A remote keyless entry car fob is quite useful. It’s essentially a wireless...

Tonight at the Seattle Visual Foxpro user group meeting Richard Stanton gave a great presentation of the new reporting features of VFP9, which is currently available in beta . The question came up about how to use XSLT to create HTML from XML. I...

I wanted to get a picture into my blog, which isn’t run by my web site. It actually gets posted to 2 URLs: http://blogs.msdn.com/calvin_hsia or at http://weblogs.asp.net/calvin_hsia I can view and edit my entry in HTML, so I just added an...

I like the convenience of shopping online. Not only are there lots of goodies available, but it’s easy to jump from store to store with a couple keystrokes. However, it’s very hard to tell if the ordered product is shipped in packaging...

My 7 year old daughter Wendy has been clamoring for her own email account, among other things (like her own cell phone). She’s been using a computer for years, and has been using my old web server laptop as her main machine, mainly to surf kids...

Since July 4 th is nearing, I thought it would be appropriate to start my independent blog. In this first entry, I’ll add a few pointers to prior entries that I made to our VSData team blog. Solving a customer problem is my blog narrative describing an...