CoolBeans: From College to Industry

In case you didn’t see over on the PowerPoint Team Blog , there’s an entry on my awesome feature addition to PowerPoint 2010! Adding this feature to the product was a bit of challenge as we didn’t originally plan to do it. But we found most of the...

I always hate providing a SWAG [guess] on how long something will take. Predicting how much time I will work on something is never a good indicator on when the item will be finished. A talent a good dev will have is to take two 1 week features and...

Been busy getting Office14 out the door. One thing keeping me busy is crashes buckets from Office 2007. When an application crashes, it will send information back as to where the program was when it crashed. These crashes are analyzed and grouped together...

I was asked “How do I fix more bugs?” The answer is to own buggier areas! Devs who own buggy areas (best when not through some fault of their own) will resolve more bugs because more bugs will be incoming. Another is to file bugs and fix them. Not...

I’ve noticed one thing in my travels through airports: power is king . I routinely bring a laptop and MP3 player stocked with music and movies to watch during the flight but I always over prepare incase I get stuck waiting. But all of this is for...

Like SmartArt but wish there was more flexibility in customizing its shapes? We added just such a feature in Office 2007 SP2 which gives you the ability to ungroup a given diagram in PowerPoint. Just right click the border of a top level diagram and...

A quick note: you can now download Office 2007 SP2 or read more about it here . There are some pretty sweet things in this update that I got to work on; I'll touch on "...more control over the appearance of SmartArt graphics" in a later post.

Practically every book I see advertised on The Daily Show I've gotten at my local library. But this sometimes leaves me with tons of books piled up to read. So I started getting the books on CD when I can and using the CD changer in my car to queue up...

I bought a place back in September and had just this week gotten things mostly settled. Then today some people knocked on my door. I opened, and there were 3 men, 2 women and baby. It sounded like the makings of some kind of movie sequel, but not the...

Take this for example: #include <iostream> #include <iomanip> class Storage { public : Storage() : m_val( -1 ) {} int m_val; }; class Holder { public : Holder() : m_double( 50000 ) {} union...

According to many Slashdot commenters , the answer was clearly “Yes! Just be tactful and careful, and make it über geeky.” Of course, those of us who live in the real world know the correct answer to be “Did you ask your boss first?” Otherwise,...

NASA recently tested their “ Deep Space Internet ” protocol. It sounds pretty slick, enabling more complex missions with multiple satellites or rovers all communicating to each other and back to earth. Unfortunately, we won’t be pinging any satellites...

Many exciting things have been happening since we shipped Office 2007, but most have been "hush hush". As in "Chris, don't tell your friends you're working on TOTAL AWESOME FEATURE X as you will make them jealous." But not all my time is spent on cool...

It’s finally arrived, proof of the Microsoft engineer’s celebrity status ! What’s the first thing you see in the following picture? ( collider.com ) ( much bigger version ) That’s right, it’s Office 2007! I always wonder what low level...

In an effort to cut down on my water and towel bills, I’ve started biking to work. Thanks to free showers and free towels (plus free soap and free locker), I can now spend the money saved by showering at work on things needed to maintain the bike. ...

http://channel8.msdn.com/Posts/Hey-Genius-Meet-Chris-Becker/

I’ve been using Hyper-V for a couple weeks and have been pleasantly surprised at how much benefit it’s brought me. What I love best is how I can start up a VM on my server box, add a network card and then log into it using remote desktop on another box...

Attend a meeting where people are talking about bugs, pick one and demo a fix before the meeting is over. Booya.

I don’t know how many times I’ve thought to myself that I knew it all. Many times I’ve coded something that I was absolutely sure was correct only to find out I was drastically wrong. What’s wrong with this code? class Object { public : ...

Why do I like working here? Because everyone is like a kid in a candy shop when we get new equipment. This week plastic bags are scattered around offices like wrapping paper torn from carefully wrapped gifts. People are excited and smiling when they walk...

Step 1 - Find a problem that plagues everyone but everyone just kind of puts up with it because that's the way things are and fix it. Step 2 - ??? Step 3 - Profit!

Today we had a bit of a network outage in our building. It was there, there and there some more. Then it was gone, gone, gone! Since most geek socializing happens over some kind of instant messenger or Facebook wall, this is a major disruption in our...

For those of you at RIT, be sure to stop by the career fair on Wednesday. I’ll be the guy gloating over how awesome his job is compared to the guys in the next booth.

Are you a good developer? It’s not just the code you’ve checked in, it’s the code that you’ve allowed to be checked in too. When someone sends you code for review, it is your duty to make sure it’s up to the quality bar set for your team. Compromise...

Any large company will have a variety of positions opened at any one time. This means that when you fly out and interview, you may be assigned to the team that needs head count the most. Or the team that the recruiter thinks you’re a best fit for. Or...