Tales from the Smart Client

My colleague Joe Marini has written a much needed introduction to PropertyTriggers . Another colleague of mine has just submitted an article about Storyboards to Chris Sells. Watch these spaces! These are just two of the hot Avalon topics I've mentioned...

The posting is very insider, but if you work at any company of significant size you'll probably know what he's talking about. Most people hate the review system, at MS or wherever they work. One strategy for dealing with it is to ignore it as much as...

In the large, I can't yet tell the world what I'm working on (hint, PDC). But the past few weeks I've been hard at work on a XAML parser and serializer. Now Marc Clifton has shown you can implement a XAML parser in 300 lines of code , so you may wonder...

All this web stuff is just soooooo... confusing.

For obvious PR-ish reasons, Microsoft encourages employees to have public blogs. For obvious ego-ish reasons, a ton of Microsoft employees have taken the company up on the deal. I had a personal blog 3 years ago before I left Visio, at a time when it...

Within 15 minutes of my last post, Bob pointed out that the purpose of Wiki Spam is to increase the Page Rank of their sites. So, I understand the business model now, I just don't get the ethics... Bob by the way, has an interesting looking site.

For relaxation purposes (yes, I am a geek) I've been playing with dynamic programming languages: Perl, Python and Ruby in particular. Recently I found a project to build a Ruby bridge so you could use it with .NET. The site is set up as a Wiki: http:...

Curious how long before I get comment spam.

Avalon has made an enormous amount of progress in the nearly 3 years I have been working with it. I've had some little projects at work recently, and it is increasingly a pleasure to do them in Avalon...whereas in the past, the stability and incompleteness...

Came across the AWS blog coverage of the Amazon Developer's Conference . It's a very different business from what I do, but I love the speaker list and the discussions.

Microsoft announced it was laying off 62 testers today . I don't know the details of this layoff, and I certainly don't want to trivialize the situation these people are in. But but there's actually an industry wide technology story behind this. For a...

Hmmmm...Kinda hard to tell what the business plans are, but this at least rhymes with what I wrote: http://www.microsoft.com/athome/security/spyware/strategy.mspx

Walt Mossberg at the Wall Street Journal reviewed the beta AntiSpyware program from Microsoft. The summary is it isn't very good yet. But Mossberg makes an important point: Before getting into the details, let me say a word about Microsoft's role in protecting...

When my colleague Joe Marini was slashdotted a few months ago, I remember a post from the peanut gallery about how Joe should switch to an open source server to get better reliability. Hmmm... who would have guessed MozillaWiki was running a crappy commercial...

Looking through some more papers at IdeaBlade, I found ObjectWare references. I briefly did a ObjectWare based prototype project about 10 years ago when ObjectWare was SmallTalk based. Cool technology then, if not exactly mainstream.

As much as I would enjoy tooling around Redmond on a bulldozer , I think it is fair to say Microsoft's growth potential is limited by our ability to find great candidates, in particular ones happy to endure our rainy winter months. If Microsoft wants...

I know next to nothing about IdeaBlade or their products, but the white papers are right on target: Build Smart Client Internet Applications As a quibble, I do prefer the term Rich Client. I know why they refer to it as a Smart Client, but it can imply...

What Mini-Microsoft doesn't seem to get is that Microsoft is in an industry driven by growth and innovation. Yes, we have our share of Black Hole projects that sop up resources and never ship. But in the outside world there are whole companies like that...

My last post is not intended to be typical of this blog. I pride myself on technical knowledge and programming skill, not business acumen, but I have worked at a bunch of different companies and am interested in the industry. Recently I've been working...

Mini-Microsoft is always an interesting read, for the pure uniqueness of its iconoclasm, and the odd thrill of wondering who might be the author. So it is with some reluctance that I have come to realize: Mini-Microsoft is just plain wrong. Yes, Microsoft...