Stephen Fisher

The silver clock

Stephen Fisher — Mon, 06 Dec 2004 21:48:00 GMT

My 5-year anniversary just came and went (I would have completely forgotten except for the nifty swag) on November 22nd. I now own one of those groovy silver clocks with multiple time-zones and my name and anniversary engraved across the front.

It's pretty common in MS to send out anniversary emails that detail the employee count, major product releases, and for old geezers, the non-split stock price for the starting year. In my case, I was just excited to be working on cool technology, so I didn't pay attention to the rest. I do remember running NT4 and after a long year of nag-mails from execs, I begrudgingly upgraded my dev box to a Win2000 beta. I can certainly admit that I had no good reason to avoid the upgrade except I didn't want to deal with even the slightest UX tweaks. At least I had empathy for consumers :)

Not much to say yet about my CLR security features - waiting for Whidbey Beta-2 so I can speak up.

In the meantime, please offer patronage to Shawn [CLR Security Tester] for his amazing security blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/shawnfa

TabletPC for a security consultant

Stephen Fisher — Mon, 15 Nov 2004 20:52:00 GMT

Ok - I admit we didn't do much direct marketing of the TabletPC in security circles, but that doesn't mean security circles wouldn't love one just the same.

Dana performs a post-mortem on a Toshiba Portege TabletPC purchase.

Outlook item selection with a pen

Stephen Fisher — Mon, 23 Aug 2004 18:09:00 GMT

Kent Compton (http://blogs.msdn.com/Kentc/) provided a tip on how to select multiple Outlook items with a TabletPC pen (e.g. deleting email).

"Here's what I do for deleting/marking read/etc. contiguous emails:

       1) Hover your mouse just on the inside of the line that divides your folders and email (see below).
          The mouse's pointer will point to the right as opposed to the default left.
      2) Press the pen down and drag it up or down for the messages you want to deleting/marking read/etc.
      3) Hit the delete key or press the pen's right mouse button for the other actions."

Updated: Fixed newlines

Ink signatures in Outlook using Word

Stephen Fisher — Fri, 20 Aug 2004 17:46:00 GMT

One of the Microsoft Office program managers passed along some handy steps for creating an ink signature in Word for use in Outlook.

NOTE: Make sure that when you create the signature in Microsoft Word using "ink drawing and writing" (not "ink annotations") and use a filled-in canvas background (e.g. white). The default is transparent, which will display the ink as anti-aliased.

        Detailed instructions:
   1. In Outlook, go to Tools | Options | Mail Format tab
   2. Press the Signatures button at the bottom of the dialog
   3. Press the New button in the Create Signature dialog
   4. Name the signature and choose "Start with a blank signature"
   5. Choose Next
   6. Choose Advanced Edit button on the Edit Signature dialog
   7. Choose Yes to launch Word
   8. In Word, choose Insert | Picture | Ink Drawing and Writing
   9. Ink your signature in the canvas
   10. Choose Stop Inking button on the Ink Drawing and Writing toolbar
   11. Set the canvas fill to be white
      1. The user can either:
         1. Right-click on canvas and choose Format Drawing Canvas, then choose White on the Fill color picker
         2. Double-click on canvas, which brings up the Format Drawing Canvas dialog, choose White on Fill color picker
         3. If the Drawing toolbar is up, choose White from the Fill color split button
      2. TIP (for user, which you may or may not want to put in the topic): If you are using a colored email stationary, you may want to choose a Drawing Canvas Fill color that more closely matches your stationary.

After this, the steps are the same as with all signature files: Close Word, save the changes, and the signature file is saved in Outlook.

Updated: Fixed newlines

Resources for developing as non-admin (LUA)

Stephen Fisher — Fri, 20 Aug 2004 17:39:00 GMT

Here's a couple resources (some older and some newer) that should be useful for those of you looking to protect your base system from accidental or malicious modification.

Developing as Non-Admin [in Visual Studio.NET]: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dv_vstechart/html/tchDevelopingSoftwareInVisualStudioNETWithNon-AdministrativePrivileges.asp

Aaron Margosis' Non-Admin Blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/Aaron_Margosis/

Updated: Fixed newlines

How time flies... and returns like Mordecai

Stephen Fisher — Thu, 19 Aug 2004 20:59:00 GMT

You'll have to pardon me for falling off the planet for the last (almost a year). No, I wasn't hit by a bus, although it was a wild ride!

The last time I posted, we [the TabletPC Avalon Platform team] were about to commit some substantive changes to the TabletPC platform object model for Longhorn/Avalon. To be frank, the 'commitment' was fairly involved and my blogging time dissipated almost immediately. After those changes took effect, I went on paternity leave with my son, and helped out the TabletPC group in some new customer/community and development infrastructure areas. Over the last 6 months, I was fortunate enough to work with Philip Su (you might have noticed his momentous splash in the blog scene).

So, what's the big news that led to my emergence from hibernation? I'm quite excited to announce my new job [still at Microsoft] within the Common Language Runtime Security team - developing Whidbey and Longhorn features. I've only been here a couple weeks, so there's not much that I can say yet about upcoming work. However, for those of you wondering about life in the CLR team or questions for the security team - why not ask "the new guy"?

Other blogging folks in the CLR Security team include Shawn Farkas (current Tester), Greg Fee (past Developer), and Ivan Medvedev (past Tester).

To add a bit of parasitic spice to the mix, if you have any questions for Jim Hugunin (no blog quite yet) about dynamic languages, IronPython or joining Microsoft, I'd be happy to interupt him as he's sitting a few feet from me. <grin>

So this is a TabletPC Blog, eh?

Stephen Fisher — Mon, 17 Nov 2003 02:16:00 GMT

Boilerplate Welcome mat:

Welcome to my humble node on the internet...

My name is Stephen Fisher, and I'm a developer in the TabletPC team at Microsoft. Specifically, I'm part of the team which ships the TabletPC Platform SDK, including the digital ink recognizers, the digital ink API (including the Microsoft.Ink .NET namespace), and a set of developer samples.

Coincidentally, I just noticed some posts in a couple blogs requesting more involvement from the TabletPC product team for developers. Thanks for the interest. Traditionally, the product team has been very active on web-based message boards and in various newsgroups - some of us have even been known to sit in bed with their TabletPCs at 3am answering posts - the warm glow of the screen keeping spouses from too much r.e.m..

My main focus is on the technical end of the TabletPC (API development and engineering), but you'll find all manner of TabletPC related material and links on this blog. Please feel free to use the category links at left to filter my ramblings - I hope most posts are mildly useful (living in the shadow of Chris, ya' know), but my feelings won't be hurt if you don't sync to “Random Drivel“ after this post.

Boilerplate Personal Stuff

I've been at Microsoft nearly 5 years - the first three in the Speech technology group, and the last 2 in TabletPC.

In Speech, I worked on multi-modal speech interface research (MSR), shipped the Microsoft Speech API (5.0 and 5.1 SDKs), and built a speech-enabled Media Player plugin for Windows XP Plus! Pack. I wrote a great deal of the documentation on CFG support in the SAPI 5 SDK and have been active in both the Speech and TabletPC newsgroups (in case you have questions about Speech with SAPI ).

As far as business card-style job titles go, I was a Software Design Engineer in Test (QA and tools at Microsoft) while in Speech, and I'm currently a Software Design Engineer (software developer) in TabletPC. Bottom line is I eat, breath, and dream source code (well except when I'm critiquing directors or building with LEGO brick).

This blog will be primarily focused on TabletPC, with a leaning towards developer support. However, don't be surprised if I slip in the odd comment on speech support, .NET in general, or my other favorite topic - developing secure code. I'm a hacker at heart and my Outlook inbox is subscribed to about 30 distribution lists - over 1000 email a day filtered with custom Exchange rules - so I try to keep my typing fingers in all sorts of pies.