yag: Community and Architecture

Moving on...

Yair Alan Griver — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 20:33:49 GMT

It's been a while since I've posted on the blog - as I moved to more internal teams, I haven't had as much to talk about. That's all about to change. Below is an email I just sent out. You can find my new blog (actually, my old personal one) at http://yalangriver.wordpress.com/. Hope to see y'all there!

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In keeping with Microsoft tradition, I’m writing to all of you to let you know that December 2^nd is my last day at the company.

I’m going to be taking a COO position at EC:Wise, a 100+ person consulting company that specializes in business intelligence, analysis and data services as well as a position in an associated startup that is providing automation, analytics and social networking for the casino industry. As most of you know, I’ve always been interested in helping companies attain their goals and enable better focus on their customers – whether thru transactional systems, data analysis or social networking. This allows me to hit many of these things at once. Additionally, it has the added bonus of working with some people that I’ve known for over 20 years, including
someone that I used to work with in my own company back in my New Jersey days. Finally, I get to spend some time working not only in the .NET world, but the open source world as well.

My nearly 10 years at Microsoft have been an incredible learning experience – you’ve all been part of that. I’ve been involved in the creation of some amazing software, some incredible teams, and I respect the
fact that this has been one of the few large companies that encourages you to speak your mind. If I can leave anything with y’all it’s to keep fighting to do the right thing by customers – both internal and external – even if you have to be creative to get there.

I’ll be staying in the Seattle area – and can be reached via my personal email at yalangriver@hotmail.com, and of course on Facebook at www.facebook.com/yalangriver.

Please keep in touch.

yag

Watch Channel9 Videos on your TV

Yair Alan Griver — Sun, 17 May 2009 01:42:46 GMT

Pretty cool. I have my XBOX 360 playing Hulu, YouTube and other videos via MediaMall's PlayOn software. Channel9 posted the source code to a plugin that lets you watch C9 videos, screencasts, etc., via the TV too. The video is pretty clear - I could see the VS code really well.

Cool! VPC and USB

Yair Alan Griver — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 04:34:00 GMT

Joe Homnick has an awesome blog entry on keeping your VPCs on a USB key (your undo drive on your hard disc). He says that he's getting great performance, and it's easy to keep your VPCs with you wherever you go. Great for training classes.

Check it out!

To Linq or Not To Linq, that is the question...

Yair Alan Griver — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 03:20:00 GMT

Jim Wooley just posted a great entry on his ThinqLinq site. It involves using Linq to XML and VB9's XML Literals to query Shakespeare's plays. He first joins all the plays on his drive together into one big XML file and then gets the top 50 characters by the number of lines they speak. Head over there to see the code. Very clean, IMO.

Those of you who know me know that I'm a Shakespeare fanatic and a pretty big fan of Linq also <g> - this post just made my day. Great way to (almost) start the weekend. Thanks, Jim!

Community-based music producing

Yair Alan Griver — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 20:47:00 GMT

Many years ago I saw Jill Sobule do a show - and I enjoyed her sense of humor and stage presence. Bought a few of her CDs to check them out. Anyway, was looking around today and found this site. It's called Jill's Next Record! and asks the community at large to help her produce her CD. She offers various things for different levels of support - and keeps a tally on the site (currently at around $26,000). Some of my favorites:

$25 - Polished Rock Level: An advance copy of the CD. Weeks before the masses.

$50 - Pewter Level: An advance copy and a "Thank You" on the CD.

$500 - Gold Level: This is where it gets good! At the end of my CD, I'll do a fun instrumental track where I'll mention your name and maybe rhyme with it. And if you don't want your name used, you can give me a loved one's instead. What a great gift!

$750 - Gold Doubloons Level: Exactly like the gold level, but you give me more money.

$5,000 — Diamond Level: I will come and do a house concert for you. Invite your friends, serve some drinks, bring me out and I sing. Actually, this level is a smart choice economically. I've played many house concerts where the host has charged his guests and made his money back. I'd go for this if I were you.

Heck, for $10,000 you can sing on the CD or play cowbell - your choice. <g> Never too much cowbell...

Anyway, just a data point for how things are changing in this more connected society.

For your weekend programming theory watching pleasure...

Yair Alan Griver — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 02:14:00 GMT

There's a new video on Channel 9 about functional programming. Erik spends most of it on his whiteboard. Make sure you're in a quiet room for an hour. <g>

Volta preview is released

Yair Alan Griver — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 03:25:00 GMT

Erik Meijer and I have discussed Volta a number of times - very exciting to see it released on Live Labs.

A few links that should be interesting:

Erik's announcement post on LTU.
The Volta team blog
Wes' blog - with a "Hello, World" walkthrough
HarishK's blog
The Volta forum

Windows Vista border issue and SP2

Yair Alan Griver — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 21:15:00 GMT

We've figured out the Vista border issue (we think). We couldn't reproduce it here, but Jim Slater noted that it happens for him when he changes the bordertype in the init. As Calvin mentioned in these blog entries:

Windows Vista Aero BorderStyle Paint problem as non Administrator

Fix your forms to paint borders correctly under Vista Aero

Vista doesn't allow you to change the border type after the window is created unless you are running as administrator (in fact, he duplicates this in C++). He discusses ways around this - but this is not an SP2 issue - there's nothing we can do about this in our SP.

SP2 comments

Yair Alan Griver — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 11:10:00 GMT

I've been reading the comments here and on some sites about SP2. I wanted to give my point of view about it and ask for a few things from the community.

Milind, Calvin, Aiwen and I have been going thru the reports and trying to reproduce them here on multiple OS' and on SP1 and SP2. We haven't been able to succeed. Tonight I heard from John Koziol that he and some former VFP testers were testing SP2 (on XP) as well and they came to the conclusion that it is stable as well.

So, that leaves us in a bit of a bind. One thing that occurred to me over the weekend is that some folks that are seeing problems may have installed SP2 over the beta - which is not supported and may have left files in a strange state.

So, if you are having issues (let's start with the Vista ones), can you please be sure you installed SP2 over a plain vanilla VFP9?

For instance, on VFP9 SP2 fixed the following bugs reported here on my blog:

The intellisense bug: try to use arrow up/down to select the items show from intellisense got multi-selection
Windows Vista Aero BorderStyle paint bug as Calvin talked in his blog.

We tested both of these in multiple combinations and kept getting correct results.

Oh, and for Bernard Bout's DateTime bug - we think that happened due to another fix for DateTime (kinda like what happened when we fixed the GROUP BY in an earlier version of VFP), but we need more info to repro it. One workaround to please try is to use methods (rather than properties) that return DateTimes.

Feel free to leave comments here if you've reported something, or even better, via Connect.

Thanks!

Updated SP2 now online

Yair Alan Griver — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 20:53:00 GMT

It may take around a 1/2 hour to propogate to all the servers, but it's now online.

Whoops!

Yair Alan Griver — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 05:02:00 GMT

As some of you have noticed, we had a bug in our SP2 release. We forgot to update the file with the splash screen in it. Nice getting back online to messages about it. My thanks to those of you who mentioned it nicely. <g>

Anyway, Milind and I have already started putting together the files and process needed to get a new version out there. Hopefully it will be out tomorrow. Sorry to everyone about the restart...

Free DBI Controls with VFP9 SP2

Yair Alan Griver — Sun, 14 Oct 2007 02:12:00 GMT

Now that SP2 is out, you can go ahead and download the free ActiveX controls being made available by our friends at DBI. The controls include the following:

	ctTray		Offers developers direct access to the standard Windows System tray for presentation of application icons for example
	ctDEdit		The perfect masked edit control for date and time entry
	ctContact		Outlook-style contact list with find and in-line item editing
	ctToolBar		Full Windows XP styling of the ToolBar and ToolBar menus
	ctListBar		The only multi-column ListBar control outside of Visio
	ctDays		A fully modifiable Outlook-style single column DayView control
	ctDropMenu		A drop-down, pop-up menu control with individual item image and text/sub-text features.
	ctFrame		Manage an array of components within a single component. ctFrame makes it easy to create boxes, title bars, and container objects with a variety of border effects.

Devteach in Vancouver and Party with Palermo

Yair Alan Griver — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 01:41:00 GMT

I'll be speaking on Silverlight at Devteach in Vancouver the week of November 26th. Devteach is an awesome conference - and this year has a full track on XNA - which should be interesting. And improving on things this year, Jeff Palermo is throwing one of his "Party with Palermo" free parties at the conference! The one he put together here in Seattle at the MVP Summit last year was a ton of fun. Hope you can make it

Almost forgot - some dude named Ken Levy is doing the keynote. Wonder what that's all about? <gd&r>

VFP9 SP2 Ships!

Yair Alan Griver — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 08:18:00 GMT

As stated in the latest monthly letter, we just shipped Service Pack 2 (SP2) for VFP 9! You can download it here. We've also made the bug list available.

The source code to the VFP and VB.NET components will be made available next week.

My thanks to everyone on the team that worked so hard to make this happen.

German VFP, SQL Server and .NET conference in October

Yair Alan Griver — Sat, 08 Sep 2007 20:51:00 GMT

I'll be speaking at a conference in Frankfurt, Germany on November 8-10. I'll be keynoting the VFP conference and doing a session on VB.NET (including things like LINQ, Silverlight and future releases). This is one of my all time favorite conferences - Rainer really focuses on the attendees - great food, lots of chances for 1:1s with the speakers and other attendees, just an overall wonderful time. Click on the pictures to go to the website for the conference.

Did Blogs save Microsoft?

Yair Alan Griver — Sat, 11 Aug 2007 03:02:00 GMT

Here's a great post about blogging and its usefulness in corporations. The quote I wanted to point out:

What did Microsoft do? I don't know if they had it before, but it takes certain organizational cultural values. It's not about process, or rules. In fact, it requires acceptance of uncertainty and ambiguity, tolerance of risk, openness to criticism, and a degree of confidence. These are not things that can be proceduralized, but instead come from how the organization is, uh, organized, and simply the underlying values.

My first month or two at Microsoft I was in a meeting with Steve Ballmer and other VPs. We were talking about blogging, responding on Newsgroups, Forums, etc. The thing I remembered most about the meeting - and what made me so happy to be here was around the discussion of written standards. Steve (and Eric Rudder if I recall correctly) basically ended the conversation with "we hire smart people, let's trust them to be smart about what they do".

Like Gerald says, this comes from the underlying values...

Silverlight on MLB.COM

Yair Alan Griver — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 04:45:00 GMT

As most of you know, I'm a baseball fan. MLB.COM just enabled Silverlight in their video pages. The start of great things to come! <g>

Cool new social Silverlight game: Zero Gravity

Yair Alan Griver — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 03:18:21 GMT

Tim Heuer has been working with a team on testing out Silverlight. They created a game called Zero Gravity. It's unbelievably addictive. The music won't leave my head... <g>

Anyway, they've included support for a number of social networking sites - to help get the word out and to use some of the capabilities to improve the game. So you can add the main character (Lt. Bennett) to your Facebook friends, and follow along on his adventures using Twitter, for instance. Pretty cool.

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/addfriend.php?id=628361728
MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/lieutenantbennett
Twitter: http://twitter.com/LtBennett
Main Site: http://zerogravity.terralever.com/
Digg It: http://digg.com/playable_web_games/Rich_Silverlight_Game_help_me_find_my_ship

VFP and the VB Interop Toolkit

Yair Alan Griver — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 15:42:00 GMT

I'm here in Prague, have to head back to the conference for the Q&A session, but spent some time reading my RSS Feeds. Bernard Bout has a "How To" article on using the VB Interop Control Toolkit with VFP. I showed this in my keynote here, using a similar example. I also used the kit to create a control that can host WPF in your VFP form. If you want another example, check out Beth's blog entry on the toolkit.

This is pretty cool!

Yair Alan Griver — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 01:35:00 GMT

Here's a blog entry (with video) by someone who hooked up a web cam to have one computer play another in pong - totally thru the camera capture. Really a lot of fun to look at. Nice job, Ashish!

Off to Prague!

Yair Alan Griver — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 01:31:00 GMT

I'll be leaving this week for the annual VFP Devcon in Prague, Czech Republic. This is the largest VFP conference in the world and I had a great time there last year. Great speakers, great price.

We have a beta up and available

Yair Alan Griver — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 01:46:00 GMT

I wrote a little while ago about what we were trying to accomplish with our efforts. Well, the initial beta is out. This will hopefully give you some insight into what we're working on, and a place for you to give us feedback. The overall information, FAQs, videos, and other good things are here. You can also go directly to the sites:

Forums: http://beta.communities.microsoft.com/forums
Blogs: http://beta.communities.microsoft.com/blogs (I will start posting here).
TagSpace: http://beta.communities.microsoft.com/tagspace

A few points to make. This release focused on basic functionality, you will be seeing more releases coming with additional features, bug fixes etc., coming on a pretty regular basis. Can't wait to hear your feedback!

Watch the videos directly...

Yair Alan Griver — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 00:37:00 GMT

Some folks contacted me and said that they'd prefer to watch the videos I mention below directly. Here they are:

Bob's video:

Video: It's All About Bringing People Together

and my video:

Video: The Architect's Perspective

Some Microsoft.community videos up on Soapbox

Yair Alan Griver — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 03:58:00 GMT

Gotta run to a friend's for dinner, but wanted to point out a few videos up on Soapbox. One video is of Bob Rebholz - our Group Product Manager, and one is of me. Both videos talk about some of what we're working on.

Showing what we got...

Yair Alan Griver — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 20:04:00 GMT

When I left the developer division a number of months ago, people were curious as to why. I explained that this new gig was one that kept me awake at night thinking of all the cool things we could be doing. I wrote a little about this when I first joined the team.

Well, now everyone can see an early view of what we've been working on - what we like to call Microsoft.Community. Doug has a great post on what it looks like and its manifestation. I want to talk about how we got there, the thought process behind it.

To give a quick overview, Microsoft.Community is made up of three pillars, Community Discovery Services, Community Membership Services, and Community Discussion Services. Community Discovery Services enables social bookmarking and tagging, Community Membership Services provides membership and reputation services. Finally Community Discussion Services provides threaded discussion services.

On top of these, we have a number of sites. TagSpace is the codename for our social networking and tagging collection site. ClaimSpace is the codename for our explicit reputation management site. Finally, our blog and forum sites will eventually move over to new versions built on the Community Discussion Services.

That's a really quick overview. Before reading on, I highly recommend that you read Doug's post for more details. I'll wait <g>.

Welcome back! As I said before, I want to talk about how we got to this group of services and sites. To do this, I want to give you insight into our discussions.

The underlying question in all this is how do we connect people? How do we connect people to resources across the web, to communities, to other people with similar interests? I've been a big community member and booster for over 20 years - on Compuserve, offering space for local user groups when I had my own company, offering speakers to local groups whenever needed, etc, Most of my best friends have come from the communities that I participated in. People from the community have stayed with me for weeks when they've needed a place, I've never been alone in a new city when going there for work because somehow, there was always someone I knew around - even if we'd never met in person. So, to me, community is an inherent goodness.

But even if it isn't inherently good, community is also useful from a learning perspective. If you find a great KB article that answers your question, you are happy. If you belong to a user group and point it out to someone else, more people are happy. If you blog about it, and those who read your blog or do a search find it, they are happy. The interesting thing is that a social, trusted network is a great way of spreading information. But how do you build that social, trusted network? How do you find the right community or people? How do you enable those communities to form at will? That's what we were asking.

Any community needs certain things in order to exist. You have to identify people who may want to be part of your community, connect them together in a venue and reward them for taking part in the community.

If you look at a user group, it meets these criteria. You typically name the user group thru its identification (The Bay Area Database Developers Association, for instance). You meet monthly in a certain location, with people getting to know each other during breaks or before or after the session. You also reward people through the natural activities - you get information, get to learn to speak better, possibly find a job (most user groups start with the question - is anyone looking for or does anyone have a job?).

Codeplex, does much of the same, but in an online, disconnected mode. It's made up of lots of communities that self-form around a project in which they have interest. It has tools (source control, tags, wikis, forums, work items) that are geared around what is needed for those types of communities. By participating in the community thru its own Codeplex project, the Codeplex team hears from folks about what else is needed and thru agile delivery, provides it quickly enough to keep the underlying strata firm and useful enough to let the communities continue to grow.

If we draw these four requirements, we can see how the services and sites provide what is needed to match these requirements.

OK. So now we have the basic outline of what we want to create. Let's look at a more architectural view for these same things. We have the services laid out horizontally and can use any combination of these for sites. With the great work of our Product Managers we coalesced on a few core sites to start. These are listed vertically, with their lower range showing which services they consume. We began, of course, with our existing sites - forums and blogs. They make use of all the services (Doug discussed one of my favorite scenarios - building your own forum based on tags). The two new sites, codenamed TagSpace and ClaimSpace make use of the two top services.

Wanting to open this up over time (using this on sites of our scale means that we have to slowly grow and be sure that we can handle this), we opted to provide a RESTful interface to all our services and we plan to embrace some of the emerging standards you see with Web 2.0 sites.

Wow! This has taken a while. In future entries, I plan to drill down into some of these services, and as we work further on cacheing and scaling techniques, talk about some of what we learn.

In any case - it's really exciting to have this stuff ready to ship. We want to get your feedback (look here for a post when it's live) and hope to release updates pretty regularly as we move forward.