JoeN's Blog

Taming Email

JoeN — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 14:02:23 GMT

Every once and a while I look at trying to optimize how I handle email. After 10 years at Microsoft I have a few tricks but I like to the force myself out there and change things every once in a while.

This time I used a number of techniques from Scott Hanselman’s excellent post - “The Three Most Important Outlook Rules for Processing Mail” to help kick start my efforts. The Meeting Invite rule is my personal favorite. My current position here in Shanghai has me working with at least five different product teams and this means a lot of email to process as well as a lot of meeting invites. Scott’s rules are variations on ones I have been using but he did a great write up and they are well worth having a look at.

Not really connected to email rules, but another habit I changed was not reading RSS feeds inside Outlook. RSS support in Outlook is a great feature but I felt that I wasn’t didn’t have the enough discipline to not read them all the time. I now use FeedDemon to read my RSS feeds and my life has a little more balance (+ FeedDemon has some great features).

A great visualization

JoeN — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 13:55:01 GMT

Stumbled across a great article in FlowingData about the about the 5 Best Data Visualization Projects of the Year – 2009.

I liked all of them but I particularly liked “The Jobless Rate for People Like You”. A beautiful interactive graph – especially the ability to discover the other lines and what they mean. I definitely need to find a way to add something like this into my work.

SlickRun (Anson told me so)…

JoeN — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 12:40:52 GMT

SlickRun is a great utility written by two of my friends at Microsoft (Anson and Eric).

Anson has been using this forever and has tried several times to get me to use it. I never really got into it but the other day I downloaded it and have finally realized why it is so cool. Quickly added to my list of essential software to have on my machines.

Anson - I’m sorry it has taken me so long to understand:-) Eric is also the author of the extremely popular Fiddler.

Great demo of MEF

JoeN — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 14:33:01 GMT

As a PM in Microsoft’s Developer Division, I always try to make sure that my presentations are relevant and accessible by developers.

Mike Taulty does a great job of describing MEF (a great new technology in the .NET Framework) in a very clear and programmer friendly way. MEF is a very flexible piece of technology and one danger in presenting flexible technologies is that you jump into the details too early and lose the audience.

Mike does an excellent job of describing MEF to developers. Things I liked:

The example used is easy to understand
Mike’s pace is easy to follow (he has clearly practiced the flow)
Mike’s use of VS is excellent, he knows his way around Visual Studio and it shows.

The series so far:

Bootable VHDs in Windows 7 made easy

JoeN — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 04:48:34 GMT

Scott Hanselman has a great series of posts about how to enable booting from VHDs in Windows 7. As a PM at Microsoft, you often need to do demos of software in various stages of development. This can present a problem in terms of hardware as most PMs don’t want to manage and travel with multiple laptops.

If you want to the use one laptop, the traditional approach is to use Virtual PC to run a VHD. This works but performance (especially on a laptop) was an issue. You could definitely improve performance through various techniques but it can get complicated.

Windows 7 changes this dramatically as “Boot from VHD” is built directly into the OS. Not only do you get great performance but you also get access to the “hosting” file system. If you have any requirements around running beta software (or another OS) you should look at this feature.

Scott has some very easy to follow directions to get started:

This is the new standard on my PM team and I have been using it as well – check it out.

Commuting and Podcasts

JoeN — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 13:59:22 GMT

I have quite a long commute to work which means that my Zune HD is an essential part of my day Personally I think that the Zune HD is an awesome experience - the hardware and software are simply outstanding and everyone that I have shown the device to has been very impressed. I have a Zune Original and it’s more important to me than my phone!

I currently subscribe and listen to about 25+ podcasts which keeps me quite busy (but also happy) during my commute. When people hear that I have a lot of podcasts they usually ask what they are. Well here they are:

Must Haves

WNYC Radio Lab (zune) – amazing topics, people and production values. Every episode is delicious to listen to!
This American Life (zune) – a classic show with great topics and people.
NPR: Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me (zune) – a fun look back at the week in the US
Ted Talks (zune) – an amazing conference with a huge variety of talented speakers from anywhere and everywhere.

General News

Marketplace (zune). Good general overview of what is happening in the American market.
NBC Nightly News (zune). General nightly news in the US.
NPR: Foreign Dispatch (zune). Weekly wrap up of the best foreign news from NPR.
Planet Money (zune). Interesting coverage of money related issues

Work Related

You can’t go past Channel 9 for information about Microsoft technologies.
Manager Tools (zune) for some great information about how to be a better manager.

Entertainment

Sometimes I just want to relax and laugh, so I listen/watch:

The Rotten Tomatoes Show (zune) great writing and funny hosts. This podcast helps me decide what movies I will watch.
The Bugle (zune) for a good dose of British style humor.
Creativity Top 5 (zune) - cool ads that have appeared.
Best Ads on TV (zune)– cool ads on TV (many are from Australia)
The Digg Reel (zune) – crazy videos floating around the Internet
The Soup Podcast (zune) – snippets of TV culture.

Miscellaneous

This I Believe (zune). Revealing insights from people about what they hold dear.
Vanguard News (zune). A twist on the news.

Gadgets

The Engadget Show (zune) – the podcast has just started (and it shows) but some good content on gadgets.

Music for the Gym

Two of the podcasts below were not specifically done for working out at the gym, but they really work well there!

[House Music] Pureibiza Podcast Taku Nakahara (zune). The one I currently listen to when working out.
Bar Grooves
FitMusic (zune). DJ Mystery is the one to look for

What’s happening in Australia

7:30 Report. Local reports on Australian news.
Media Watch. A revealing critique of Australian media.

New Year, New Campus, Starting up again…

JoeN — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 14:34:46 GMT

It’s been a long time since I last blogged, but with the New Year I have decided to start up again. I want to blog about things I find interesting especially about things outside of the direct products I work on – more along the lines of personal productivity as well as general presentation related information.

A little update about what has been happening with me. After having a good run with the XNA Community Platform team, I left and went back to the Developer Division and helped start up the tools for Windows Azure. It was a great experience working with the Azure team as they developed the platform, building tools for a moving platform has some unique challenges:-).

In the middle of 2008, I made a fairly big change and moved to work for Microsoft’s Developer Division in Shanghai (part of STB China). I am now the DevDiv China GPM working with all our teams here delivering technology as part of Visual Studio 2010. This of course was a big change for my family and I quickly learnt that a family of 5 with three boys is often commented on as you walk down the street (“san ge erzi!”).

To restart the blog I thought I might share some pictures of the new campus we have moved into. After a long wait we have finally got a brand new Microsoft specific campus in Shanghai:

Here I am taking some photos:

Some pictures of one of the entrances and lobby:

Here is my office and the view from the window:

XNA GSE Game: The Dishwasher : Dead Samurai

JoeN — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 19:25:00 GMT

One of the guys on the team just forwarded a great video from a GSE game "The Dishwasher : Dead Samurai".

It looks amazing and I love the visual style. It's great to see games like this popping up from the community.

I think the Dream Build Play competition is going to be generate quite a few interesting games!

Back to planning:-)

Which Visual Studio version will you use?

JoeN — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 23:49:05 GMT

I didn't get a lot of responses to my previous XNA Game Studio Express blog entry (perhaps because I let this blog die to inactivity:-() but I thought I'd try to spice things up with a different Visual Studio focused question.

As we finish up the refresh release to XNA Game Studio Express, we are looking at the next major version and some decisions that need to be made. I wanted to get some impressions from people around a particular topic that I am currently looking at.

As many of you know, Visual Studio is releasing a new version at the end of this year (codenamed Orcas). One of the major features we are planning to add in the next major version of XNA Game Studio Express is the ability to create games in all SKUs of Visual Studio (Express, Standard, Pro, etc). With Orcas coming, the next obvious question is which release of Visual Studio should/can we support.

I have the following basic questions:

How quickly do you personally move to new versions of Visual Studio?
What's the impact you would feel if we only supported the Orcas version of Visual Studio with our new functionality?
What's the impact if we supported only VS 2005, and added Orcas support later (in a refresh release a few months after Orcas ships)?

Joe

20 seconds of pain!

JoeN — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 22:33:06 GMT

I've been suffering from a very painful audio problem on Vista. Towards the end of all my songs the sound would suddenly start to skip and the sound would be very jittery for the last 20 seconds or so.

Initially I put it down to driver issues but after installing new ones, the issue still occurred. I got annoyed and eventually stopped playing a lot of music at work in my office. I finally had enough the other day and a quick Live search later a resolution appeared "turn off sound enhancements":

http://help.lockergnome.com/vista/windows-media-player-skips-ftopict36704.html

No more skipping and I'm much happier!

XNA Game Studio Express and Visual Studio

JoeN — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 23:30:00 GMT

Customers have used our product forums and Microsoft Connect to tell us that adding support for all versions of Visual Studio (Standard, Professional, etc) is a major feature they would like in the next major release of XNA Game Studio Express.

Delving into the feedback there are some consistent asks for specific features. The most common asks are:

Expanded debugging functionality. People want to use some advanced debugging features not available in Express (more debugger windows (threads etc), different breakpoint functionality (conditional, tracepoints etc) etc).
Source Code Control. People want to be able to check their projects into source code control.
Profiling information for Xbox 360 games. People want to get a better idea about the performance of their game on Xbox 360.

We are definitely investigating these areas and more but I wanted to extend an invitation to anyone to send me mail or add a comment about any specific Visual Studio feature they want to use while creating a game. I'll gather the feedback and make sure that we incorporate it into our planning.

Fire away!

Flying High at 70!

JoeN — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 23:29:00 GMT

It was a dark and gloomy night in Netherstorm when FJ (Rogue) and Devnul (Druid) escorted a poor wanderer on his appointed task. After a short walk, a great battle was engaged and after the dust had settled the Invasion Point Gate was finally closed.

Upon returning to the quest giver, FJ was rewarded and finally leveled to 70. Here's a happy picture of the occasion:

Once turning 70, FJ just had to get his flying mount:

So that's what I have been doing for a while now (the last push from 66 to 70 was kind of crazy in terms of time management) and that's why I have a considerable sleep debt at the moment!

Now that's it's over I'll have some time to blog about work related issues.

Please turn off all electronics, Nike+ shoes and...

JoeN — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 06:54:53 GMT

I gave into temptation the other day and bought some Nike+ runners and the iPod extension thing so I could run and get feedback.

I've turned into a bit of a shoe freak, so I actually ordered one of the Nike ID shoes where I could customize everything on them (this included getting my GamerTag ("Feral Joe") printed on them).

I actually read the manual for the shoe insert that wirelessly transmits to the iPod receiver and came across this delicious warning:

"Important: Put the sensor to sleep before taking it [iPod sensor] on an aircraft, to comply with applicable government regulations"

I laughed when I read this. Can you imagine the looks you would get if you were in the waiting area for a flight and pulled off your shoe, removed the insert, grabbed a small high tech looking device from the shoe and used a paperclip to press a button on the sensor. If you were lucky you might be able explain, otherwise you might be in for a nice chat with a TSA employee.

And don't even think about doing that on the plane itself!

Interview with GameCareerGuide

JoeN — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 21:01:25 GMT

I recently answered a number of questions about XNA Game Studio Express from Alistair Wallis at GameCareerGuide and the article has just appeared.

I'm still alive

JoeN — Mon, 15 Jan 2007 22:11:36 GMT

Michael came into my office this morning and made a comment about my lack of blogging over the Xmas/New Year break. I informed him that I spent way too much time playing WoW, watching the NFL and College Football to have any time to blog.

But I am back at work and busy working on various features around XNA Game Studio Express. My highest short term priority is making progress on our sharing story for XNA Game Studio Express games (and waiting for the Burning Crusade to come out!).

Visual Studio SP1 released

JoeN — Mon, 18 Dec 2006 22:54:30 GMT

Visual Studio SP1 has just been released. I'd encourage anyone using XNA Game Studio Express to install it. This SP has a number of fixes in it and from personal use it unblocks some Vista related issues.

Remember to install the Express version of the SP.

Maybe is just another word for no

JoeN — Mon, 18 Dec 2006 21:09:30 GMT

My five year old told me this the other night as I was putting him to bed :-). It's amazing how many things kids understand.

Hey, I asked a team for a feature the other day and they said maybe...

Where's the content?

JoeN — Tue, 12 Dec 2006 21:25:40 GMT

As a programmer I can understand code but I have little/no artistic talent. One of the key things we wanted to address with XNA Game Studio Express is making content a first class citizen in the IDE.

A lot of people today have two completely different systems when they build their game: one for code and one for content. Building content is a non-trivial task involving exporting, normalizing and processing content and then sequencing this with a relevant code build. We wanted to make this whole process simpler for enthusiasts so we have a pretty complete (and pluggable) content build system in XNA Game Studio Express. Michael talks about the content pipeline here.

But what good is a content pipeline without content? Well, buried away on the XNA Partners page is some links to some interesting things you might want to look at:

Autodesk FBX SDK - SDK for handling FBX files.
GarageGames Torque X - cool versions of their frameworks and tools using XNA Framework
SOFTIMAGE |XSI MOD tool - build your own models for your games
Turbo Squid - pick up some free models to prototype your game

I'm going to unlock the inner artist in me over the holidays and put some content through that pipeline.

Your World. Your Game.

JoeN — Tue, 12 Dec 2006 04:33:24 GMT

Relatively old news (well 12 hours to be exact) but we shipped the first version of XNA Game Studio Express today. Michael has some information about it here.

Shipping always makes me a little reflective and I wanted to share the fact that I have been a PM at Microsoft for over 7 years and have worked on two products:

C#
XNA Game Studio Express

I've had a lot of the different PM positions on these teams but it's amazing that I have "only" worked on two products.

I joined the C# team as the first full-time PM working on the C# compiler. The team at the time was around 8 people, 4 developers and 4 QA. I remember thinking at the time about the responsibility of bringing a new programming language to the world and we worked hard over the years to make sure that we had a world class solution that developers loved.

A few years ago I started to look around for a new challenge inside Microsoft. I wasn't expecting to find something that would change things as fundamentally as C# but along came XNA. Yet again I was the first PM on the team and over the last two years we've done a lot of listening and learning from people in the game industry. Now we are releasing XNA Game Studio Express and I'm as proud of it as I was of C#.

One of the things I love about working on development tools or frameworks is that they provide a platform for you to build incredible things. Our new tag line "Your World, Your Game" really captures our intention with the product.

Everyone has a great game idea but most don't have the tools to build it. I hope that XNA Game Studio Express gives you the tools that allows you to build that game you have always wanted to build.

The Escapist

JoeN — Thu, 07 Dec 2006 04:21:37 GMT

I always look forward to the Escapist, it's always well written and it has interesting topics. If you haven't seen it you should take a look.

Experiences with Vista

JoeN — Wed, 06 Dec 2006 06:30:31 GMT

I moved my main laptop over to Vista about two months ago and overall I'm really happy with the switch (I have been using Vista on my second machine for much longer on various builds available inside the company).

I really like Vista, it has major upgrades all over the place, way too many to list here. With every upgrade I not only see the major changes but I tend to pay attention to the smaller aspects that change how I work everyday. Some of the smaller things that I have noticed are:

Renaming a file. Renaming a file in File Explorer only selects the file name and not the file extension. In XP when you rename the file, both the file name and file extension are selected so you have to carefully select just the file name before typing. Most of the time you are simply changing the file name so Vista makes this nice and easy.
Moving files. On many occasions I move a bunch files from one folder to another. Sometimes I have multiple File Explorer windows open and they tend to overlap a lot. Vista now has a cool feature that shows you the destination as part of the drag animation, it certainly makes it clear where the files are going and whether they are being copied or moved.
Networking. It's a lot simpler. I love the fact that when I go to a coffee shop or plug in at a hotel, it detects the network and presents me with a choice of network types (home, work, public) and adjusts the security settings based on what I choose.
File Explorer Location Bar. I love the new explorer location bar! At first it was a little different from what I was used to but now I can't live without it. Its cool to be able to select a specific location in a path name without having to manually edit a path.
Gaming. Gaming is vastly improved with Vista. I would rarely swap out from a game to do something in Windows XP because the overall performance when switching back and forth wasn't the best. This has dramatically improved in Vista, I now happily swap out on those long flight routes in Wow to check thottbot for information about the quests I am on.

I know a lot of these seem trivial but I've been really impressed by Vista. One of my machines has Windows XP on it and every time I swap to it I miss Vista type features.

XNA Game Studio Express and DEMMX

JoeN — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 21:07:13 GMT

I posted an entry on the XNA team blog about how XNA Game Studio Express won an award at the recent DEMMX awards.

Boyd and I had a lot of hassles actually getting there because of a unfortunate flight time and then delays at the airport. The hotel the awards were at was very nice but we had a really short stay in LA (less than 12 hours) so it was pretty rushed.

It was an interesting event, mixing music, TV and the games industry. An especially interesting part was two songs by Sandra Bernhard, I never knew she sang but it was a sign that this wasn't a normal "computer" type award ceremony.

Stay on target, stay on target...

JoeN — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 08:21:29 GMT

Kind of a strange title I know, but I started to the write a long blog entry about project systems (which I will post at some stage) but I wanted to get to the heart of a matter that members of the team are currently talking about.

The issue we are discussing is how important building a game that is guaranteed to run on both Windows and Xbox is to you. We expect many people to fall into the following working styles:

Develop primarily for Windows, at some stage build the game for Xbox 360.
Develop primarily for Xbox 360, at some stage build the game for Windows.

We are debating adding a third option to the list above - something like "develop for both platforms at the same time". Essentially this means making sure that as you program we modify the experience to make sure that you don't accidentally start using platform specific functionality (e.g. a mouse on the Xbox 360, reference a platform specific assembly etc).

To enable this option we would have to add a fair bit of functionality to the IDE - Intellisense filters, referenced assembly checks, perhaps some FxCop type post processing to get this right etc. It certainly is technically viable and it would be easy for us to dive into this work but I wanted to get people's reaction to this idea.

Is the third option a priority for you, or is it more of a nicety? The XNA Game Studio Express team is focused on making sure that games run on the platforms we support, so our natural tendency is to build out the third option, but I'm not sure that our customers will value it as highly as we do (or perhaps prefer us to work on other features).

We do want to address the current issue of having to have two projects (one for each platform), but how far do we go towards making sure that you "stay on the rails" if you want to build a game that runs on both Windows and Xbox 360?

I love to get any feedback on this issue - thanks.

XNA Game Studio Express and DEMMX awards

JoeN — Fri, 24 Nov 2006 20:18:43 GMT

XNA Game Studio Express has been nominated for awards in the following categories at the Digital Entertainment Media and Marketing Excellence awards:

Innovator of the Year
Game Innovation of the Year

I'll be flying down to LA for the event and let you know how it goes. Last year Xbox Live Arcade won in the same categories - wish us luck!

The Long Tail and XNA Game Studio Express

JoeN — Fri, 24 Nov 2006 19:50:55 GMT

One of the most interesting business books I have read lately has been the The Long Tail.

Given the planning work I'm doing with XNA Game Studio Express (getting close to shipping now!), it was a fascinating book and really helped articulate the "gut" feel that many members of the team feel when it comes to community generated games.

Many of the management team have also read that book as well, so that allows me to use some of the terminology in the book to help describe what we planning to do around sharing games. As I started to do more research I found that XNA Game Studio Express had been picked up by many people and linked to the Long Tail (including an article by the author himself). Some of the links I found were:

Chris Anderson (author of the Long Tail) also links to an post about some comments that Peter Moore (one of my indirect bosses) made at a conference around game development. A surprising number relate to the work that we are doing:

Beyond The Boys In Their Bedrooms. Appeal to a much wider audience.
Don’t Pass The Buck On Rising Development Costs. We need to find ways to reduce costs and restructure our revenue models.
Rebel Without A Platform: Bring Aspiring Developers Into The Fold. For too long we’ve expected the developers of the future to claw their way up to us … we have to start coming to them and proactively develop a farm team of future stars.
It’s A YouTube World: Embrace Community Created Content. We’re control freaks when it comes to how games are delivered to consumers. We need more spaces where garage designers can get noticed.
Set Us Free. We should look at delivering new IP in new ways that recognize how powerful a concept shaping your own gaming experience is.
We’re Too Cool For School: Make Ourselves More Approachable. Games are more powerful, but less approachable. We need to make more games for more people. Expand demographics, online gameplay, strong family settings.
Lower The Total Cost Of Ownership With Choice. Consumer should have choices, starting at entry level, purchases should be upgradable, don’t lock consumers in.
Treat Windows Like A Gaming Platform. Windows as a platform reaches more people than any console ever will.

I think that points 1, 3, 4, 6, 7, and 8 are particularly relevant to what we are doing.

So if you have the chance, pick up and read the Long Tail - it's well worth the read.