aWorkBlogByGus

The BPT team is hiring...

Gus Perez — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 22:59:00 GMT

If you want to make a difference to a lot of people—users and developers alike—working on a product with many millions of users is a great place to start. The Browser Programmability and Tools team is building a new, faster, more scalable, modern JavaScript runtime for Internet Explorer. We’re also responsible for defining and shipping the entirety of the HTML5/JavaScript toolset and developer experience. With the rise of HTML5, the importance of these tools and the JavaScript runtime will only increase.

Our team’s charter includes:

Developing a fast, standards-compliant JavaScript runtime
Creating great HTML5 and JavaScript development tools for Visual Studio
Building the “F12” developer tools that ship in Internet Explorer

We are seeking innovative and experienced developers, program managers, and testers. Feel free to look through the job descriptions linked to below and submit your resume for any you're interested in pursuing:

We’re looking forward to hearing from you!

Windows Azure Tools and Live Framework Tools Refreshed

Gus Perez — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 05:41:00 GMT

We’ve just refreshed the MIX releases of the Windows Azure Tools and the Live Framework Tools. The updated versions address an issue that would cause Visual Studio to close unexpectedly if run on specific language editions of Windows (e.g., German). In addition, the Windows Azure Tools refresh includes a fix that allows targeting a different instance of SQL Server other than SQL Server Express.

There’s no reason to upgrade to the new versions if you’re not affected by these issues but we felt they were worth addressing for those who have encountered them.

These updates address the issues described in Jim’s post and Danny’s post.

Note that these were *just* posted to MSDN and sometimes take a few hours to propagate across all download servers. To make sure you're getting the latest bits, please make sure the "Date Published" on the download page is 3/20/2009.

Just updated my Windows Azure Links page

Gus Perez — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 02:41:00 GMT

I've just posted an updated set of Windows Azure resources I've come across over time. While some of these sites are just getting started (and therefore don't have much content), I figured I'd include them since they seem to be targeting the Windows Azure space specifically. If I've missed any, feel free to contact me (via email or DM me on Twitter) and I'll consider them the next time I update the page.

Silverlight Debugging in Windows Azure Web Roles

Gus Perez — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 20:09:00 GMT

In the latest release of the Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio, one of the new things you'll find is that we've added support for Silverlight debugging (i.e., hitting breakpoints in your Silverlight code). I originally posted some quick steps but have decided to just point everyone to a much more thorough post by Jim that has all the details one needs.

Windows Azure SDK and Windows Azure Tools Updated - Jan 2009 CTP

Gus Perez — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 00:30:00 GMT

We've just released the latest version of the Windows Azure SDK and the Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio. For the most part, we've concentrated on making things more robust, improving performance, and fixed plenty of bugs.

The areas you should mostly see improvements on are:

Code/Build/Run/Debug cycle
Support for Silverlight debugging on Web Roles
Improved Development Storage Service integration
Service definition and configuration file errors are now detailed in VS
Bug where publishing a package that was above a certain size would fail has been fixed as well

As always, the best place to post questions is on the Windows Azure Forum on MSDN as members from both the SDK and Tools teams monitor it.

Jim, has also posted about the release with some more details as well.

Created a Windows Azure Links page

Gus Perez — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 20:19:00 GMT

After yesterday's post, I've decided to create a single page that I'll update whenever I get a chance with links to sites that are focusing on Windows Azure. It includes both Microsoft and Community sites. Here's a link to it and I'll be adding it to my sidebar in a few minutes. Feel free to contact me with any other sites you think are worth adding to the list and I'll check them out and get them on there if it seems like the right thing to do.

Azure community off to a great start...

Gus Perez — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 20:26:00 GMT

While we're busy planning and working on the next release of the tools it seems a vibrant community has begun to rise around Windows Azure and other related services. It's been really fun to watch this happen as quickly as it has and with great quality. We had been working on all of this for some time eager for the PDC to arrive to see how customers and the community as a whole would respond once everything was announced and made available. It's been a couple of weeks now and there is plenty of goodness going on out there and I figured I'd give some link-lovin' to those that are clearly working pretty hard on getting content out there and helping people get started and go well beyond. Here's a list of links I've run across and will continue to check out going forward:

AzureCoding.net seems to be off to a great start run by Brownie and co.
Tanzim Saqib has been posting some great articles recently.
MyCloudApp.net is a wiki that covers Windows Azure as well as the rest of the stack.
AzureJournal.com is also worth visiting and subscribing to.

Of course, if you're not already doing so, definitely subscribe to our PM Jim Nakashima's blog who's clearly not sleeping more than a few minutes per day lately.

If there are any others out there that I missed (I'm sure I did), I apologize, but feel free to contact me and let me know as I'm sure I'll post again in the future in an effort to help folks starting out with Windows Azure find more resources online. Thanks all! Back to work now...

Install blocked on Visual Studio SP1?

Gus Perez — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 20:48:00 GMT

The Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio runs on top of either Visual Studio 2008 Standard (or above) or Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition. However, it requires the SP1 version of these and the installer will block if either of these are not at SP1 level with the following message:

Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio requires Visual Studio 2008 SP1 or Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition SP1. If you installed pre-SP1 components after upgrading to SP1, please reinstall SP1 and try again.

We're finding that some users that have both of these installed on their machines are left wondering what's wrong when they see this error message for a variety of reasons: some installed the Express version a long time ago and didn't remember they still had it, some weren't aware that installing the SP1 update for Visual Studio doesn't actually update the Express versions on the machine (a separate SP1 update exists for each of those), and some are expecting that it would work if only one of them was updated.

In the end, we require any versions you have be at SP1 level to reduce confusion and problems in the future. That said, we'll work on improving the error message (more specific and more actionable) in our next release.

In the meantime, if you're seeing this error with our October CTP, make sure you've applied the SP1 update for whatever versions of Visual Studio 2008 you have on your machine. You can find the updates here:

Visual Studio SP1
Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition SP1 (read this before upgrading)

Also, if you're one of those folks that are using a non-Express version of Visual Studio full time now and no longer plan on using the Express Edition, uninstalling the Express Edition should also get you past the installer error.

User name with spaces?

Gus Perez — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 19:52:00 GMT

Turns out there's a bug in the October CTP of the Windows Azure SDK having to do with user names that contain spaces. It looks like the right folks are on it at this point and it will hopefully get addressed in our next release (still figuring out our release frequency story). The best way to get around it and have everything work is to actually run under a user name without spaces. But if that's really not an option for you, you can try the following:

Open up an elevated command prompt.
Navigate to the directory where the Windows Azure SDK is installed (e.g., C:\Program Files\Windows Azure SDK).
CD your way into .\v1.0\bin\devfabric.
Start the dfservice.exe process as follows 'dfservice -sp <path_without_spaces>' where you replace the last argument with a directory that doesn't contain any spaces.

Next time the Development Fabric starts up (either from running your app from Visual Studio) or launching csrun.exe from the command-line, things will work reasonably but there will be problems around clean-up logic.

F# Worker Role type available now too!

Gus Perez — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 00:55:00 GMT

I'm not quite sure anymore who was first (doesn't really matter anyway) but I just noticed Luke from the F# team recently posted an MSI that will install an F# Worker Role template that will work against our CTP bits. You can find Luke's post with the details here and you can download the actual bits from here.

Windows Azure enabled Windows Live Tools CTP is now available

Gus Perez — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 20:38:00 GMT

Check out the first release to extend to our set of "Role" projects one can use for developing Windows Azure services. Vikas, a PM on the Windows Live Developer Platform team, just posted the details on their latest release. It includes instructions on how to create a "Windows Live Web Role" with our tools.

Windows 7 Support

Gus Perez — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 17:40:00 GMT

Yesterday I spoke to two folks trying to get the Windows Azure SDK and our tools working on Windows 7. Unfortunately, we've found that there's something around the time when you try to run your Azure service locally that fails. The right folks are looking into it now and we hope to have everything working in an upcoming release. In the meantime, the only supported OS' are Vista and Windows Server 2008 (32 or 64-bit of either).

Danny introduces the other side of our team...

Gus Perez — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 01:39:00 GMT

Our team, the Cloud Computing Tools team, is responsible for the bits I've been talking about so far but our team is also responsible for delivering the Live Framework Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio. Here's a link to his post and be sure to check out their tools as well! To do so, just follow the steps in the "Getting Started with the Live Framework" of our Dev Center page.

Windows Azure Gallery

Gus Perez — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 01:33:00 GMT

Steve Marx has shared out a link to the Windows Azure Gallery. If you've got a cool app that you want to share and already received a token (i.e., you can deploy your app), feel free to submit it to the Gallery.

PDC 2008 Hands On Labs are now available

Gus Perez — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 01:02:00 GMT

Jim, our team's PM, points to the Hands On Lab walkthroughs folks have been getting through at the PDC. Here's a link to the details. If you didn't get a chance to do it at the PDC (either because you saw the lines and didn't have the time or you're not at the PDC) these are a good way to get your hands dirty with our new bits.

Video streams of PDC sessions on Windows Azure

Gus Perez — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 01:59:00 GMT

If you weren't able to attend the PDC or did but missed any of these keynotes/sessions, the video streams for some are already up and actually really good quality (go Silverlight!). I'll update the links as they come on live but for now feel free to check out the ones with live links below.

Day 1 Keynote - (stream) - Demo happens around the 35 minute mark.
A Lap Around Windows Azure - (stream)
Developing and Deploying Your First Windows Azure Service - (stream)
Essential Cloud Storage Services - (stream)
Day 2 Keynote 2 (The Don & Chris Show) - (stream)
Modeling Data for Efficient Access at Scale - (stream)
Windows Azure: Programming in the Cloud - (stream)
Cloud Service Development Best Practices - (stream)

You can find all of the sessions and keynotes here also--tons of good stuff.

Update (10/31 @ 10:25am): Updated the rest of the links.

Our DevCenter is now up...

Gus Perez — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 01:51:00 GMT

The Cloud Computing Tools DevCenter is now up here. You can check it out here. As always, any comments/feedback are welcome.

Windows Azure. A big day for us.

Gus Perez — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 07:33:00 GMT

Today was a great day for those of us working on the project. I feel lucky to have the opportunity to be in attendance at the PDC to watch our bits in action in several of the sessions (including the first demo of the keynote today) but also to get a chance to hang out with customers at the hands-on-lab watching them spend a couple hours going through the walkthroughs that take them through a good introduction to what's available today. It's great to see the excitement they have (and eagerness to get those prized "tokens" soon) and also great to see so many of them "get it" very quickly after getting a chance to experience the bits directly. While this is just the beginning and we have a lot of work to do still it's great to see that a lot of the decisions we've made so far on what got in and what didn't were (mostly) confirmed as having been pretty good calls.

Anyway, to update folks on what I've been up to in more detail (since lots has changed since I regularly posted on this blog), I'm the Dev Lead for the team building the "Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio" (lovin' six word product names--could have been worse actually). If you don't know what Windows Azure is, here's a good starting point and here's where you can download our bits. You can find our team blog here which will likely be a great place to keep up to date on the VS side of Windows Azure and we'll be launching a technology page in the next day or so as well with more information, walkthroughs, etc. We've also got a forum that can be found here.

The most exciting part about it all is that we can finally interact with customers who are looking to use our tools and getting their feedback. I look forward to hearing from anyone who has questions, suggestions, or any other type of feedback. Since we're a pretty small team and planning on releasing quite frequently, the feedback we get will certainly have a big impact in helping us shape the product going forward and also help us in prioritizing what it is we focus on first.

A few of us are at the PDC for the remainder of the week and would love to chat with anyone who's interested in what we're up to. Feel free to drop by the Hands-On-Lab area or the Windows Azure lounge and you should be able to find some of us. You can find a list of other team member blogs on our team site. In addition to this site, I'm also on Twitter here and would love to hook up with any folks using our tools.

Blog Redux

Gus Perez — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 19:46:00 GMT

My last post was well over a year ago. Since then, after shipping VS 2008, I moved to a small new team working on some bits that will be announced and made available next week at the PDC. Good times indeed. Pretty sure that also means this blog will start getting some more content early next week. Should be fun...

It's been a while, eh?

Gus Perez — Wed, 02 May 2007 07:54:00 GMT

Wow, it's been about a year and a half since I posted on this blog and I've recently been pinged a few times by folks wondering what I've been up to so I figured it was worth checking in.

About a month or so after my previous post (soon after shipping Whidbey), my time on the C# Compiler team came to an end when I moved over to the Deployment Technology Group as the Test Manager. We're working on several projects all focusing on--surprise, surprise--deployment. We've got a team focusing on the Setup Project in Visual Studio, another working on the internal toolset used to author the various VS and .NET Framework SKUs (it's based on WiX), and a team working on the actual VS/NetFX installer. It's been a lot of fun and quite challenging and we've got some pretty big plans for the future.

Anyway, though I haven't been blogging on this site for a while I have actually been reasonably active on my personal blog: http://blog.gusperez.com. I've been thinking about bringing this blog back from the dead if I find some time to start posting about some more work related items but I won't promise anything as that's something I've fell short on in the past (just look down about five or six posts and you'll see what I'm talking about). My other blog is mostly on the geek side though so it may still be of interest to the folks who've still somehow remained subscribed to this one all this time.

That's all for now. Just wanted to pop back in with an update that I originally planned on posting over a year ago. Better late than never I guess...

Another C# team member blogs...

Gus Perez — Fri, 21 Oct 2005 01:29:49 GMT

Vijay has started blogging. Note that he's had a blog for a while now (Jan 2004) but he's now actually adding entries. :) Head over to his blog and read up on some of his great work and background testing Whidbey's C# Edit-N-Continue feature. Good stuff.

New Snippy is out. Finally.

Gus Perez — Tue, 04 Oct 2005 10:09:00 GMT

You can get the latest version of Snippy from GotDotNet. There is a beta 2 version as well as one based on the latest RTM RC so most people should be covered.

New version of Snippy coming...

Gus Perez — Fri, 30 Sep 2005 01:32:31 GMT

Turns out Snippy has had a growing set of users over time which have been emailing me quite a bit recently inquiring about future updates. I haven't been able to work on it for a while but I have now found it a new home. Some of the good folks on the VSEditor team (including my wife :)) have taken my code, updated it, and are in the process of getting out to the community again. So Snippy should be back soon; sorry for the delay.

Introducing Hovervue...

Gus Perez — Sun, 14 Aug 2005 09:27:00 GMT

Got a chance to code some today and I finally got around to getting Hovervue all packaged up and usable by anyone who's interested. You can get the full scoop on my personal blog. You can also see screenshots here which are pretty self-explanatory as to what the app does. If you decide to try it out (note it's a Whidbey beta 2 app, so the beta2 redist is required) I'd love to hear any feedback/ideas/bug reports you may have.

For those who might remember, this is actually an app I wrote during the beta 2 appweek. The other members of the team created a bunch of tiles for it (e.g. Outlook mail/calendar tiles, RSS readers, our internal bug database tiles, etc.) but I've only included the ones I've creted myself so far. More tiles should come in time including some of those created by others on that appweek team (I'd like to check with them before posting their stuff). Eventually, I'll also write up a quick document to describe how anyone can create their own tiles as well.

Nullable DCR

Gus Perez — Fri, 12 Aug 2005 09:08:00 GMT

Lots happened with Nullable pretty late in the game and it sure was a big effort by a bunch of people across several teams to make it happen. Check out Soma's post about the Nullable DCR and get a quick summary of how things are changing...