Noah Coad

My colleague, Paul Harrington , has created a 3D maze in WPF (runs in the browser) that's certainly worth checking out.  The interesting thing is that it totally built using WPF Data Binding.  It has 3rd & 1st person views, and walks you...

This is a great quick list of the scifi movies in the pipeline .  All sorts of great movies are under production, including: The Hobbit, Star Trek XI, Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, Indiana Jones IV, Wall-E (Short Circuit III animated?) The...

Being a native born Texan now living in Seattle for almost four years, every time I go back to TX I'm amazed at the little Texan details I never noticed before.  I'm visiting the in-laws for two weeks over the Christmas holidays in Spring TX (just...

This is one of my favorite new blogs, http://www.howtogeek.com/ .  It rocks with tons of great tips and reviews on cool little tools.  Lowell does a great job reviewing tools, tricks and tips, and his blog is well organized and looks solid....

This is really cool!  I'm not a big political guy and honestly haven't been keeping up with the presidential candidates as much as I feel it's my duty as an American.  This tool asks your opinion on the top political issues in this race and...

I used to call the 411 info number of my cell phone company (AT&T/Cingular) until they jacked the price up from  $0.99 to $1.79 , what a ripoff!  Now I use Google 411 , dial 1-800-GOOG-411 (800-466-4411) from any US phone.  Quick, easy...

The Parallel Computing Platform team has launched a new Parallel Computing Dev Center along with our the first Community Technology Preview (CTP) of extensions to .NET for parallel computing. Parallel Extensions to the .NET Framework CTP download Soma...

It's official!  The product we've all be waiting for is released!  It's been a fun ride, 2 years 12 days since VS 2005 was released.  Our new version has a lot of great new functionality. Check it all out at the MSDN site for Visual Studio...

In 2003 my 5th grade sister Hannah Joy entered the Arbor Day National Poster Contest and took 1st at State, and then went on to win 1st in the national round out of 75,000 participating schools.  At state she planted a tree on the State Capitol property...

The Visual Studio Industry Partners conference is going on right at the Redmond Marriott hotel in Redmond, WA (close to the MS main campus).  It's a time when we get to interact with partners who are creating addins and packages for VS (like ReSharper...

In today's age of receiving dozens to 100s of e-mails a day, quickly processing these is critical.  Microsofties are known for the volumes of e-mail we deal with, particularly as a Program Manager.  As ScottHa mentions , " these guys used...

What would a perfect world look like where your using Visual Studio with two or three (or more) monitors?  One of the new Visual Studio 10 (Visual Studio 2008 = VS9) I'd like to nail is darn good multi monitor support, but I've got a lot more investigation...

Playing ice hockey was always a dream for me, coming from Texas and having played a little roller hockey.  Thanks to a persistent colleague, I found out about hockey in the area.  It is super easy for anyone (a newbie to former pro) to get involved...

On my office door, thanks to http://xkcd.com/242/

"How do you keep up with what's going on at Microsoft?" a student recently asked me.  Good question!  So I told him I'd do a little post on it... Probably the best way is through either prolific MS bloggers, 3rd party bloggers, or...

LINQ is out in strength and I've got to admit, even though I talked to Anders Hejlsberg over three years ago about it, I've just recently started using it in my own code. There's a lot out on the net about it, but here's my 2c to help people get started...

Most developers I know (including myself) use at least two text editors on their box, a full blown development environment like Visual Studio, and a lightweight editor (or mid-weight) like notepad.exe, Notepad++, Notepad2, vim, emacs, UltraEdit (my favorite...

I've been ticked off with my Smartphone lately and love my iPod Nano so was totally stoked about the new iPhone, until I went and spent and hour with it in the Apple Store. I was sorely disappointed. :( Here's why... The iPhone Pros Beautiful UI! Love...

One of the areas I'm taking charge in Visual Studio is the Macro system. We want to make macros rock in the next rev so I'm collecting customer evidence data to figure out how people are using VS macros and what would make them rock (like supporting C#...

In my pursuit of getting closer to the heart of our development tools, I've taken up a new position as a PM on the Visual Studio Platform team! Team System has been my home since I first joined Microsoft three years ago and I believe it is an amazing...

Due to popular demand for community participation in further development, I've posted the Search Work Items (Team System Addin) project up on CodePlex at: http://www.codeplex.com/searchworkitems I've heard a lot of good ideas for improvement and it appears...

TechSmith created a plugin for SnagIt that lets you take a screen capture and real quick create a new work item or update a work item with the image attached, cool. They did some nice stuff around it too, check it out... Download the SnagIt Output for...

Dawn and I went backpacking this past weekend to Alaska Lake, up the Gold Creek Trail in the Alpine Lakes Wilderness Area of Washington.   It was a beautiful 6 mile hike, crossing three streams, and climbing 1200 feet in the last mile on an...

I recently had an app that I used the VSTS Profiler on to find that a significant portion of time was spent comparing some long strings. I was using String.Equals(string a, string b, StringComparison.InvariantCultureIgnoreCase) since I didn't care about...

The Visual Studio Team System Profiler is a tool that helps find resource bottle necks in your application. Like slow code (CPU bottleneck), disk thrashing, memory allocation, etc. I'm on the team that builds the Profiler, so here are some Profiler goodies...