John's Blog

Ah, well this is interesting. If you can read this, I managed to adjust the date when this blog entry would be posted to a week after I left Microsoft. At this moment, I'm probably enjoying some very unhealthy fried food in Belfast. So thanks again for...

OK heroes, this is my last blog entry as today is my last day at Microsoft. I’ve greatly enjoyed the last eight years here, and sorry I can’t say longer. However, it’s back to Ireland I go. If you would like to stay in touch, please feel free to visit...

Good news if English isn't your first language, or, I guess, you want to test your foreign language skills. Using a rather cool machine translation system from Microsoft Research, the Content Publishing Team have managed to convert the Windows Moble 6...

Back to work for a moment: if you now go to the MSDN site and check the Windows Mobile docs - in fact, the entire Windows Mobile and Embedded docs - you'll see one important difference: nothing. Well, hopefully you won't spot anything out of the ordinary...

Someone suggested in a comment to a previous posting that I write about the current state of the industry, and as I’m leaving the company, I might as well be completely honest. That would be a great idea, but remember that I only have the viewpoint of...

Last month was my last full month at Microsoft, which means it was also the last full month in which I had a chance of getting more hits on my blog than my manager. I didn't manage it! Despite the fact that he didn't have a single new post, he still beat...

As a 40 year-old computer nerd, I’m interested in how home computer programming has changed over the years, and I’m seriously wondering if we’re seeing the end of the hobbyist computer programmer. Hey, I’m leaving Microsoft next week, so indulge me. ...

Next week will be my last at Microsoft. It’s just shy of eight years ago, that I came to the US from Northern Ireland, to work as a Programmer/Writer for the Visual C++ team. I worked on the ATL and MFC documentation, and to be honest – and this is something...

I’ve recently been working on a Windows Mobile Starter Kit (I’ll be uploading it shortly) that interacts with the internal Contact’s database on the Windows Mobile device. Last time I wrote an application that tried to read the Contacts, I used C++ to...