scooblog by josh ledgard

UPDATE : Welcome Slashdot visitors. I'm not sure how to submit a correction to slashdot, but I am NOT the person responsible for the WIX/WTL projects. I site them as examples and am working with people who where responsible for those projects to enable...

Hello Scooblog readers! If you read my blog and have a blog then please leave a link below. I’d like to read your blog too. I’m looking to shake up my subscribed feeds list and the first thing I want to accomplish is make sure that I’m listening to my...

The VS Help team is looking for feedback wrt a last minute default setting. Anyway, here is the feedback request: We’re making some last-minute decisions about the behavior of the local search engine for Visual Studio’s local MSDN search engine. We...

Friday marked my 5th anniversary at Microsoft! In those 5 years I've had the opportunity to have three distinct careers. I spent 1.5 years as an individual Developer in Test, 2 years as a Dev in Test Lead, and the last 1.5 years as a Program Manager....

Welcome all miss-spellers of the word “Etiquette”.   You must be wondering how your google searches for “Golf Edicate” or “Hotel Tipping Edicate” or in some cases “Strip Club Edicate” yielded so few results.   Well, that’s because you, like...

Looking for Visual Studio Bugs or Peeves...

I don't run my own server and I don't have behind the scenes access at blogs.msdn.com so its a little more challenging to spice up my blog when I get bored of the way it looks. This post describes what I ended up doing and how I did it. I'll also toss...

One of the questions I asked was “What projects or types of projects should Microsoft look to open up?” I’ll add a HUGE disclaimer here saying that this is not my choice and I have very little say into what we do across the company. I’m collecting this...

Ok, I know I just raved about my new phone like every other MS employee. No, they are not just dropping them off at everyones door. Yes, they do give us a pretty good discount on them. I spent a lot of time over the last few days trying to learn everything...

IMO the MSDN Forums have been doing really well so far. The early success and feedback has been encouraging to the point that I believe the forums will ultimately be a welcome edition to official MS community offerings. I've been pretty stressed about...

These are simply my thoughts after playing with the new site for a couple of hours. I'm having some ups and downs with the new engine so far. I'm sure I'll come to love it and there are probably some good workarounds to several of the issues I'm having...

If you read my blog then you know I've been doing a bunch of work that will hopefully result in a more unified , trustworthy, threaded discussion solution for Microsoft as a whole. Your comments have been helping a lot so far, but until we have a swanky...

So IE finally has an integrated pop-up blocker! This is great news for the millions of PC users that had not yet downloaded the google toolbar. I believe that it finally became OK for web browsers to do this because advertisers already have alternatives...

In the grand Microsoft tradition of “if you complain about or suggest something you own it” I’ve been asked to organize actual updates to the VS 2002 and 2003 start page. We have the ability to prop new content to the “What’s...

In the online world there will always be debates and discussions over security and privacy. What always surprises me is that everyone seems to be “up in arms” over security/privacy concerns surrounding your digital information over the internet, but never...

This is the 4 th of 5 planned entries in response to comments I’ve received because of this post . I’m starting to run out of themes to cover. This post looks at some of the more interesting suggestions and responses that didn’t fall into the other buckets...

So I've been posting ideas about how we could best merge NNTP usefulness and feature rich web solutions @ Microsoft. The 3rd plan I outlined involves cutting ties with NNTP and creating a better offline client that also supports the added features of...

I'm curious, if you answer questions online (blogs, forums, newsgroups, chats, irc, etc) what your motivations are? If you don't answer questions online... what prevents you from doing so?

I received a bunch of responses to this post about all the new ads. I've played around with all of the solutions proposed over the last 2 days. Here are my comments. AdSubtract : This app seems to do the best at eliminating adds. It removed all the...

I've formed a virtual team inside Microsoft whose mission is to shape the future of the Visual Studio PowerToys site. Since this site was created for customers we figured we might as well involve customers in the design of the PowerToys 2.0 site. Consider...

The Developer PowerToys site is a "work in progress" directory of cool utilities and tools developed by Microsoft and the community that are meant to improve developer productivity. Currently, on this site, you will find the original list of Powertoys...

Random Vacation Musings...

My app building yielded the v0.8 version of the VSCmdShell Window add-in. If you haven't been reading my blog your wondering what the hell this thing is so... The VSCmdShell Window is a tool window for Visual Studio that creates an instance of the cmd...

One good piece of feedback I've heard about on-line communities recently is that in today's world of easy on-line publishing. A world where everyone is now getting comfortable with on-line interaction is a world where the number of people who "shoot first...

Its slow around here this time of year and the subject of this post became the topic of a lunch conversation on our team. It's been suggested that Internet search engines can provide an answer to almost any inane question one could come up with. We...