Alan Myrvold has a new post on the Office 2010 engineering blog covering password complexity and related functionality in Office: http://blogs.technet.com/office2010/archive/2009/10/16/enabling-password-rules-for-office-2010.aspx

See also: http://blogs.technet.com/office2010/

Encouraging to see more thought and effort being put into software test patterns. Alan Page recently posted on this topic over at the MS Press Blog .

Here's a C# code snippet for iterative tree traversal of elements in an XML document using XPathNavigator that takes advantage of parent pointers. [ download source ] test.xml 1 <? xml version = " 1.0 " encoding = " UTF-8 " standalone = "...

My first article on the topic of security testing and risk management is now published in the March 2009 issue of Testing Experience magazine, pages 28-30. http://www.testingexperience.com/subscribe.php (free online subscription takes you to PDF download...

The Office security team typically targets memory-corruption bugs in the software like buffer overruns, integer overruns, and format strings... http://www.darkreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=159305

"posting nearly 5,000 pages of new technical documentation for the Microsoft Office binary file formats for Word, Excel and PowerPoint" Press release: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2008/jun08/06-30InteropUpdatePR.mspx Technical specs...

Some ideas on how to "get traction" as a software tester (especially at Microsoft): http://blogs.msdn.com/dustin_andrews/archive/2007/12/15/learn-to-get-traction-in-your-team.aspx

Now with linkable web pages! http://blogs.msdn.com/bharry/archive/2007/11/30/vsts-web-access-power-tool-for-team-system-2008-released.aspx

J.D. Meier has posted a decent index of videos covering performance testing, ASP.NET 2.0, and VSTS: http://blogs.msdn.com/jmeier/archive/2007/11/22/videos-security-performance-testing-and-visual-studio-team-system.aspx

The Unintended Consequences of the Information Age Lecture Series: Our Infrastructures: Online and Vulnerable? Jointly sponsored by The Center for Information Assurance and Cybersecurity, UW-INSER, the MS Program in Strategic Planning for Critical...

Something I will definitely be keeping my eyes on. Stuff like this tells me we've come a LONG way since the 1990's ... "After a great deal of work between the Moonlight and .NET teams, we’re ready to formally announce that we (Microsoft and Novell...

Details on Brian Harry's blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/bharry/archive/2007/07/30/team-system-web-access-power-tool-available.aspx

Port 25 is running video on what they're calling "dynamic language runtime" with some innovative type system implementations at the core. "big trick is deferred compilation ... looks a lot like linq expression trees ... backend can decide on different...

A few weeks ago I was looking for a simple way to do data driven unit tests on VS 2005 using a plain text file with one entry per line as the data source. I waded through documentation and forum posts using every search trick I know to find a solution...

"Click Here" http://blogs.msdn.com/jmeier/archive/2007/03/24/patterns-practices-security-videos.aspx

Here's an article that catches a glimpse into what makes us tick over here: http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2106952,00.asp "We want to focus on how software development might change over the next 10 years," Kass said. "And as corny as this sounds...

In today's diagnostics news... Just got email announcing the Winternals RTM of version 5.0 of the Diagnostics and Recovery Toolset available to client SA customers via the "Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack" --- http://www.windowsvista.com/optimizeddesktop

Wouldn't it be nice to be able to debug AJAX from the comfort of the IDE? Gonzo stuff like setting a breakpoint inside of some script that'll get hit client-side? We're getting there, and could use feedback. Noah has a great post on this with screenshots...

If you're looking for MSDN documentation on the Visual Studio 2005 Profiler, here's the main starting point: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/z9z62c29(VS.80).aspx I just realized this page doesn't actually have the word "profiler" anywhere...

"Ed Hintz, development lead on the Team Foundation Server team, gave us a demo of the newly released Team Foundation Server Power Tools v1.2 . Ed demonstrates a new tool for monitoring the status and uptime of Team Foundation Server as well as a new...

Just in case anyone else out there hits this issue. A friend called me yesterday asking for help troubleshooting a TFS installation problem. After installing TFS and "doing everything right" he still got 503 Service Unavailable messages. I logged in and...

If you're a SourceSafe on Vista type of person, here's some current information from Richard Berg to be aware of -- Part 1: http://blogs.msdn.com/richardb/archive/2007/01/23/clarifying-sourcesafe-support-on-vista.aspx Part 2: http://blogs.msdn.com...

Congratulations to Team Test for their award in the December issue of STP Magazine - having worked closely with that team from the start I know how many long hours and intense meetings they put in to get this product out the door!

I just got this email followup on newsgroup post from years ago related to command arguments getting lost and reset in VC with perforce. May be of use to someone in the future, so posting here... (name removed for privacy) Question (from user): ...