Riding Herd

Remember back when Microsoft apps had cool easter eggs ? Easter eggs were always a fun way for the development team to leave their mark on history. Maybe your favorite feature got cut, but hey, your name was there in lights for all to see! Leading...

Friday’s announcement has left a lot of people asking what happened to WinFS? The short answer is: nothing. But a lot happened to Windows. As I explained in my previous post, the customer and developer feedback we’ve been getting was consistent on two...

My team is also hiring a Technical Evangelist to focus on Internet Explorer . The goal of the IE evangelist (IEvangelist? not bad for a business card title…) is to help the web developer community take best advantage of new features and security mechanisms...

Haven't yet seen one person in favor of easter eggs, and in fact Tom points out that Microsoft's own book on security best practices proscribes avoiding easter eggs. So I'm willing to be swayed by the masses (or at least the few of you who posted comments...

Is there anything more fun than writing custom VBA macros to solve a problem you face in your favorite app? Actually, I'm sure there's lots that's more fun. But, since I went through the pain of figuring this out, I figured I'd post here for posterity...

There are a ton of new features in the Windows Vista platform (thousands of new APIs), some of which are accessible on Windows XP and Server 2003 via redistributable runtimes. Because of those runtimes, we often hear confusion from partners about how...

I just spent an hour helping a friend debug the strangest problem I've seen here at the Friends And Family Helpdesk. John sent me an email asking why his Shared Documents folder had been renamed to Documents, and why he now gets Access Denied errors every...

There has been a great deal of hubub about what Jay Greene’s BusinessWeek article means for Longhorn, and WinFS in particular. I’ve been surprised by the general silence on MS blogs on this topic – which is perhaps an indication that...

Well, that was an exciting announcement. There’s a good CNET interview with BillG that provides insight into the decision. Here’s my perspective on what happened We’ve gotten a lot of feedback from customers about WinFX. Among the things we heard: Indigo...

Andrew Orlowski, of The Register, recently posted a very short blurb about problems with IE 7 .  He makes two significant errors that I want to clear up here.  It took my all of 3 minutes to refute these statements on my XP SP 2 box running IE 7 TechBeta...

Jon Udell at InfoWorld is doing a series of blog entries on Longhorn. Feedster just discovered his first one, from Wednesday on the justifcation for WinFS defining a new way to manage metadata . It's a well written entry, and deserves a well thought...

For my second not-bad WinFS scenario , I’m going to again avoid anything that requires a bunch of new work entering or editing meta-data. We’ll get to those eventually, but I want to emphasize that WinFS can be useful without requiring the...

My team is looking to hire two new technical evangelists to focus on Longhorn . The positions are all about helping developers take advantage of new platform features unique to Longhorn. As an evangelist, your job is to understand what the product team...

Justin Rogers , a dev on IE's object model team, posts about his recent MSDN article on leak patterns in IE . If you're doing serious DHTML development for IE, this article is a must read. Says Justin: let's look at the following patterns...

Back in January, my manager ( Steve Cellini ) mentioned that he’d kindly volunteered me to be Content Owner for PDC . I haven’t blogged about that yet, as I’ve been spending the past 6 weeks trying to get my head wrapped around what exactly it is that...

What better motivation to get back into blogging than a challenge from fellow Microsoftie Dare: “ The WinFS folks and Longhorn evangelists will probably keep focusing on what I have termed “bad scenarios” because they demo well...

Chris’s blog has been particularly good at making clear the process a product team will go through to try to ship a product that meets their users’ needs. Certainly on the product teams I worked on, we made decisions based on what would be...

So speaking of over promising and under delivering : I just returned home from one of the most frustrating customer service experiences I've had, courtesy of the Apple store near my home. Last year, I bought my wife an iPod for her birthday. At the...

We had a good time with Soma's keynote at VSLive, and the folks at Fawcette have made the talk available via streaming media (and the transcript is over here ). Craig Neable represented our evangelism team as the demo jock, walking through our good-better...

For my first not-bad WinFS scenario , I wanted to pick something simple. No big behavior shifts to start adding new metadata, no huge rewriting of applications, etc. I settled on adding background music to home movies. I’ve been editing together...

Last month, the MSDN team published a doc that's long been in the works -- a developer's introduction to some of the new APIs in Windows Vista . The real meat is in the .chm file (self-extracting exe), with some sample code and detailed API info. This...

My post last week in response to Scott generated some good discussion about the value of developer conferences in general. It certainly got me pondering more about how we ought to think of the value of PDC. As luck would have it, our creative agency for...

One of the goodies that PDC attendees will find in their swag bag is a poster called "Lighting up on Windows Vista". It lists the top 10 things developers can do to build apps that will run like a dream on our new OS release. We've now posted a short...

The closer the PDC track team comes to locking down our session list, the more we hear from internal Microsoft platform folks who wonder why their sessions didn't make the cut (or why out of the 10 sessions they proposed, only 1 got approved). When the...

check it out, http://msdn.microsoft.com/windowsvista/