GPDE Team Blog

GPD-E supports the Zune HD release

2009-10-15T10:28:00Z

A couple of months ago some of us here in GPD-E Dublin got the chance to play with a development version of the new Zune HD . At the time the Zune team was still completing their work on the new device, however we managed to convince them to send us a sample unit. WOW, what a simply cool device, so thin and with a great looking screen which is fantastic for watching movies. Of course, being mobile web guys, we also thought it would make a great browse experience too. We wanted to make sure...(read more)

Treemap released in Silverlight Toolkit

2009-07-12T23:31:00Z

In November I wrote about our Silverlight Treemap which visualises hierarchical data as a set of nested rectangles. Microsoft’s Global Product Development - Europe team has now released this control through the Silverlight Toolkit . You can read more about this control here ....(read more)

Programming with Silverlight and C#.

2009-05-14T14:48:00Z

Marek Latuskiewicz, a senior development lead on our AdCenter team, has recently launched a blog about programming with Silverlight and C#. Marek plans to blog regularly on: 1) Ready to use, generic architectures to address interesting problems, which will include working code. 2) Short posts about certain aspects of Silverlight/C# programming. In his first post, Marek outlines how to create generic animated panels in Silverlight 2 and 3. Here’s a short extract from Marek’s first post...(read more)

I am Test

2009-04-07T16:15:00Z

There is a funny thing that happens when people mention the terms “test”, “tester”, or “quality assurance” in the computer programming industry. Groans can be heard about laborious, manual point-and-click activities. A cutting remark is almost always heard that insinuates a person who performs testing is a “click monkey.” Well, I work in test at Microsoft, and I’m a hard-core software developer. At other companies, “quality assurance” and “test” may mean different things, but at Microsoft the Software...(read more)

Attention mobile developers! New device capabilities data from Microsoft being released on CodePlex, announced at MIX

2009-03-27T18:05:00Z

PD-E’s Mobile Browse Platform team is excited to be releasing the Mobile Device Browser File, an XML file containing the web browsing capabilities of 500+ of the most common mobile phones, such as screen width and height, supported image and video types, and level of HTML support. ASP.NET developers can use this XML file (called a browser file, or “.browser”) to easily optimize their mobile web sites for 100s of different mobile devices. Chris Woods, a program manager on our team in Dublin, presented...(read more)

ACCU talk on designing for testability

2009-03-27T17:56:00Z

Sami Vaaraniemi, a software developer on our Hotmail Mobile team in Dublin, is presenting a paper titled “Designing for Testability” at ACCU, the pre-eminent European software development conference, in Oxford, England, on April 23. Read about Sami’s talk here , and learn more about the conference here . Sami’s presentation will detail how to write code so that it will be amenable to unit testing. One key point is that by writing testable code, the code also becomes more maintainable and reusable...(read more)

Microsoft Ireland speaker at the Software Quality Conference 2009

2009-03-26T18:44:00Z

Justin Saunders, a software test developer on GPD-E’s mobile services team in Dublin, presented a talk at the Software Quality Conference 2009 in Dublin on March 4. The conference is the largest quality-focused conference in Ireland and hosted representatives from major software firms in Ireland and the UK. Justin’s presentation, on “The Software Quality Discipline at Microsoft,” described how Microsoft’s R&D teams approach software quality, including different roles, processes, tools, and...(read more)

ACM SIGAPP talk on 3D scene generation with Metaprogramming

2009-03-18T14:54:00Z

Diego Colombo, a software developer on our Experimentation Platform team in Dublin, presented a talk at the ACM Symposium on Applied Computing Conference (SIGAPP) on March 10th. Diego’s paper, “Aspect-Oriented Procedural Content Engineering for Game Design”, discussed how aspect oriented programming techniques can be used to drive the content creation process for 3D scene rendering by mapping each data peculiarity to the code to generate it. Click here for more information on the conference....(read more)

Microsoft Ireland Voted Best Workplace in Ireland for 2009.

2009-03-03T12:07:00Z

Microsoft Ireland was recently voted the Best Workplace in Ireland for 2009, as determined by the Great Places to Work Institute . This award is recognition of the importance Microsoft Ireland has placed on its people for the past 24 years – developing people, growing people and investing in people in Ireland. Click here to see why our employees voted us #1. Microsoft also won first place in the European Great Place To Work survey for 2008. Based on the top rankings in many countries (Belgium...(read more)

SQL Server Query Execution

2009-01-12T15:27:00Z

Flavien Charlon, a software developer on our adCenter team team recently wrote a series of articles on his blog after completing SQL Server training by Kimberly Tripp. Each blog post outlines the different query execution plans. Part 1: SQL Server Data Structures In SQL Server, data is organized in pages. A page has a fixed size (8 KB). Each page contains records. The number of records that can be stored in a page depends on the size of the records. The operation of reading data from a page...(read more)

New Silverlight Treemap

2008-11-19T15:44:00Z

Microsoft’s Global Product Development team in Europe recently completed its Treemap control for visualising hierarchical data, seen below. You can read more about it here and leave your feedback. If you are excited by what you see us doing, check us out at www.joinmicrosofteurope.com/ ....(read more)

New adCenter "path visualization" featured

2008-09-19T16:01:00Z

Jonathan, a PM on our adCenter, recently wrote a blog post for the adCenter Community blog about the new "path visualization" feature in adCenter Analytics (see below for a picture). The full post can be read here: http://adcentercommunity.com/blogs/analytics/archive/2008/09/18/Understanding-Visitor-Behavior-_2D00_-The-adCenter-Analytics-Path-Report.aspx...(read more)

Experimentation Platform team published a new paper

2008-09-19T15:51:00Z

Microsoft's Experimentation Platform team, which includes developers in Dublin, recently published a paper in Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery. The paper, titled "Controlled experiments on the web:survey and practical guide", discusses how Microsoft uses controlled experiments to allow end users to guide the development of features. Summary: http://exp-platform.com/hippo_long.aspx Full text (PDF): http://www.springerlink.com/content/r28m75k77u145115/fulltext.pdf...(read more)

Mary Jo Foley talks about the Experimentation Platform (ExP)

2008-04-25T09:07:00Z

On April 16th, Mary Jo Foley published an article called " Microsoft looks to make product planning more science than art " where she talks about the technology, the opportunity and interviews Ronny Kohavi, the General Manager of ExP. The article goes into the history of the team and the project at Microsoft. A big part of the new technology development for this team goes on right here in Dublin. We are glad that the word is getting out! More recent news: Randy Henne, one of the founding members...(read more)

New JavaScript Memory Leak Detector from our team

2008-01-16T12:42:00Z

One of the developers on our adCenter project, Paolo Severini , created an amazing new tool for detecting memory leaks in JavaScript. It can be installed as an Internet Explorer band and it is designed to find memory leaks in JavaScript code that runs in Internet Explorer. Read more about it on this page and provide your feedback! And if you're excited by what you see our team doing, check out our job openings at www.joinmicrosofteurope.com ....(read more)

Let's experiment!

2007-12-05T17:06:00Z

We're excited to announce a new initiative here on the GPDE team -- Experimentation. We're going to be shipping a key part of Microsoft's new Experimentation Platform, which is a system for testing out different web designs and other experiments on real live users. It will initially be used by MSN and other online sites from Microsoft, and we have plans to eventually roll the service out to any developer using Windows Live. Experimentation is both a technology and a philosophy. The technology...(read more)

The data center next door...

2007-11-07T14:15:00Z

This week, Microsoft executive Debra Chrapaty visited our site in Dublin. We got a chance to sit with her and get her feedback on the great work we're doing for adCenter and Windows Live Mobile. However, Debra's main purpose for visiting Dublin was not for our group (although we do like to think that J ). In fact, she was here to open up Microsoft's new European data center, one of the cornerstones of Microsoft's global online presence and the first outside the US. When completed in May 2009,...(read more)

Our adCenter work in the limelight

2007-10-16T12:55:00Z

Yesterday at the eMetrics conference in Washington D.C., Ian Thomas presented some of the upcoming features of Microsoft Gatineau, a web and online advertising analytics service. Our team in Dublin delivered several of the features mentioned in the talk including two highlighted in this blog post from Alex Cohen -- what Alex calls "Time Shifter" (sort of an ad campaign timeline) and "Treemap", a neat way to view hierarchical data like search engine referrals. Here are a couple screenshots of...(read more)

Congratulations to our Imagine Cup winner, Flavien Charlon

2007-10-15T09:52:00Z

Flavien Charlon is a developer on our team in Dublin, and earlier this summer he and his teammate won 3rd place in the "Interface Design" event at the Imagine Cup in Seoul, Korea. The Imagine Cup is sort of a World Cup for programmers, and it brings together people from countries all around the world to compete in individual and team events. This year, Team Atomnium's submission was a Tablet PC-based travel guide written in .NET 3.0, complete with flippable pages, interactive maps, and embedded...(read more)

New recruiting site launched

2007-10-15T09:28:00Z

We launched our new recruiting web site, joinmicrosofteurope.com , this past weekend. As you can see, we're looking to fill a number of key openings for developers and leads, as well as test developer, test manager, and program manager. Please check out the site and send in your CV if you're interested. Big thanks to the crew at Brando for doing a great job helping us build the site....(read more)