The back of the box for Encarta Premium 2006 has a nifty feature chart that I've been unable to find online. Here's a posting of that chart, containing the differences between the North American versions of Encarta Premium 2006 and Microsoft Student:...

Encarta's MVP, Stephen Stakey, has just launched the Encarta SupportZone- you can find it here . As he says, it's a place to " find how-to guides, videos, and links to other Encarta-related websites". He's already spent a lot of time in the newsgroup...

The Encarta Team blog is now up and running with it's very first post. Take a look here ! The IE Team blog is currently the best team blog I've read, but I hope our Encarta blog is ultimately of similar quality. BTW- Reading the IE blog it really came...

Steve Rowe has an excellent blog post on Three Reasons To Consider Being a Test Developer (aka SDET). Nihit Kaul also follows up with some interesting comments here . One piece I'd like to add about the advantage of being a Tester (whatever the job title...

In our last post ( here ), we took a look at an Access Violation of a user mode application attempting to access memory in kernel mode address space. It's interesting to note that we can't just go reading and writing memory in the kernel- if we try to...

Pop quiz: what does this line of code do when executed? int foo = (*(( int *)0)); If you’re an astute reader, you can solve the answer just by reading the title of the blog post. But, more interestingly, let’s forget about that buzzword and analyze exactly...

Starting this week, I’ll be starting a series on the nuts and bolts of software crashes. Complex software has a seemingly infinite number of ways that can force a dreaded crash dialog, and I’m up for the task of enumerating why many of these things happen...

Mike Howard has posted some examples of buffer overflows by incorrect use of "safe" string functions. It's an enjoyable exercise- take a look here ! Greg

What’s the difference between a Software Test Engineer (STE) and a Software Design Engineer in Test (SDET)? The Microsoft career site has two excellent definitions for the Software Test Engineer and Software Design Engineer in Test roles at Microsoft...

I'm going to head off today and talk about something in the blog world, and not at all about testing. Every now and then I hear of a new use for blogs that I really like. Most of us are used to the standard paradigm, I write in a blog so my family and...

I think there's some recruiters making the rounds of Microsoft Bloggers. Gretchen and Zoe , as well as Heather have talked a fair amount about how a blog can help your career, and just last week I think I saw a bit of that. I got cold called by a recruiter...

Ever wanted to meet real, breathing, Microsoft employees and you're located around Syracuse NY? If Yes: Good News! I'll be at the Microsoft booth at the Syracuse Career Fair on Sept 30th. We'll be taking resumes, answering questions, and asking some of...

It's really hard to wrap your head around how complex software like Office or Windows is. These programs are huge, and have hundreds of millions of users. All of those users have different configurations and different settings and different ways they...

I remember listening to a young Microsoft Intern about what had been recommended to him about living arrangments. To summarize what he said: “Redmond is the best place to live, because the rush hour traffic to Seattle is terrible!“ Every...

There's an interesting New York Times article about Beta Testing for the sake of `bleeding edge' status here. It mentions: Software testing used to be done by serious computer users. Now, testers are motivated less by service than by the status...

There's been a recent spike of activity from people posting Microsoft interview questions online. Here's some links: Chris Sells' Questions for Testers , complete with some interesting SDE/T questions Aaron Boodman's Interviewing at Microsoft...

Shrini K had an excellent question about the concept of a Test Case Yield. Test Cases can take an extraordinary amount of effort to run effectively. It's not uncommon for a lead, manager, (or Testers themselves) to seek high bug counts to demonstrate...

Have you ever read Tracy Kidder's The Soul of a New Machine ? I had the chance to read it for a freshman year college course. I found it to be one of the most compelling books I'd read in my life. It details the journey of Data General engineers devoting...

Matt asked a lot of good questions in the comments about yesterdays post on the automation tools I wrote last week. Instead of answering in comments, I thought I'd just write a whole new post. First: Disregarding implementation details, how would...

Last week I expressed my love for .Net. I figure this week I should talk about what I was doing that caused those amorous feelings. Recall that my team is in the early stages of development. We're working on an existing application (Office shared code...

Wow, that's a ridiculous title. I sound like I drank the kool-aide. I guess I have, but I should give some background. Like many test coders, I'm not interested in writing robust applications. That's one of the main reasons I'm a tester. Yeah, I have...

I was walking around the hallways yesterday and walked by the office of one of the test leads on my team. He has a piece of paper in his window that says: Trying to improve software quality by increasing the amount of testing is like trying to lose...

I'm going to take a break from talking about testing and put on my recruiting hat. I've done a lot of work with Microsoft College Recruiting but I haven't done any industry recruiting, so now I'm going to pirate this space to give it a try. My team...

Encarta would be really cool if came with a talking Robot toy to explain content! There are a lot of strange ideas that come out of testers during Betas. Some ideas are very high caliber. They make us sit up and say “Why didn’t we think...

My team is still bogged down in Spec work, but we're getting close to being done. Over the past few weeks it's gotten pretty old. After all, this stuff isn't really all that fun. A lot of reading, a lot of nit-picky comments, a lot of discussions (sometimes...