Brad Abrams : Blogging

Add video to your blog for free with Silverlight

BradA — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 18:37:00 GMT

Thanks to the folks in Expression Media and the Silverlight Streaming it is now amazingly easy to add video (or other Silverlight content to you blog with Windows Live Writer. With nearly any blog host, you can write your blog, "Insert Silverlight Video", have it positioned just where you want it in the entry, transcoded with some stock vide on the front or back, with the competently customized player of your choice, uploaded to your free Silverlight Streaming account where it is served from free from a world class CDN that scales globally and at Internet scale.

Read more about it at Silverlight Streaming Plug-in for Expression Encoder and watch the demos from the man himself.

The Old New Thing: The book!

BradA — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 07:26:22 GMT

I was thrilled to get a copy of The Old New Thing recently. You likely know that Raymond is one of the most popular bloggers on MSDN and his book does not disappoint. There is tons of interesting information on both how and why things work in windows. Raymond added some additional goodness, so it is not just a reprint of his blog… A few interesting ones:

Why do you have to click the Start button to shutdown?
Buying an entire Egghead Store
Sometimes an app just want crash

I am particularly happy about Raymond's success as I way back Aug of '03 I noticed Raymond seemed to know everything on some of the internal mailing lists, and I thought he should share it with YOU… So I talked him into starting a blog (he wasn't really that hard)… Check out my introduction of Raymond… While you are walking down memory lane, check out my other posts from the Aug of '03….

Enjoy

PM Tip #72 Instant feedback...

BradA — Thu, 30 Mar 2006 21:44:00 GMT

One thing I love about blogs is the instant feedback aspects. While certainly comments on a blog are far from scientific you can get some great anecdotal responses that can help you see problems in a new way or provide some real-world data to backup one position or another. So my tip to PMs out there is to think carefully about what question you want to know the answer to and blog it! I have really benefited from the feedback I have gotten on my blog and I know several specific instances where the feedback changed my mind and\or helped me impact the product in tangible way.

Of course, you should still use the official channels such as SDRs, usability studies, market opportunity analysis, etc... but many of those are quite general and long lead. Involve the community in the heat of the moment... I would not use blog feedback as the only data point, but it is certainly a data point you should use. You do not have because you do not ask...

This topic pops to mind as I watch a couple of masters use this technique to great effect... how can any PM read these comments and not have it effect their view of the solution space!

Chris Sells on Tell me about your troubles and woes configuring, deploying and maintaining distributed .NET apps

Don Box on HTTP, XML, REST, and $100

Oh, and as users, I encourage you to respond and be heard!

My Top 10 Blog posts of 2005

BradA — Wed, 04 Jan 2006 11:39:00 GMT

Well, it is that time of year for “Top 10 of 2005”. Thanks to some help from a fellow MSFT blogger I was quickly able to generate the list of the “most popular” blogs of 2005 from this site. I was not exactly sure how to measure “most popular”.... So a did a combo. The first is the most number of hits (agg+web views) and the 2^nd list is the most number of comments... those are almost more interesting to me!

Most Hits

Designing great frameworks training: Setting the stage

PDC 2005 Registration Open

Do you have CTP Madness??

Tons of new PDC sessions just posted

Cool Console Game

Most Number of Comments

Do all programmers speak english?

“Best" method names ever..."

Designing great frameworks training: Rich Type System

OK, I give. Here are a set of internal coding guidelines

Showing Progress in a Console Windows

Anything interesting this year stand out to you? What do you want to see more\less of...

New Blog for the true CLR geek...

BradA — Thu, 13 Oct 2005 17:50:00 GMT

David just started a blog the truly geeky CLR folks will love…Like all great blogs, he is talking about what he knows best -- how to use the CLR’s profiling APIs… that is if you wanted to *write* a profiler this is your blog! I also find it interesting as it explains a bit about how the CLR really works under the covers…

http://blogs.msdn.com/davbr/

Enjoy

Mike Downen, CLR Security PM jumps into blogging

BradA — Sat, 28 May 2005 14:03:00 GMT

Mike is the PM for the CLR security system… excited by his recent CLR RoadTrip to Arizona he jumped into blogging with some good info on obfuscation…

Take the .NET Framework 2.0 Compatibility Challenge

BradA — Fri, 27 May 2005 06:36:00 GMT

Lots of buzz around the issue of .NET Framework 2.0 running your current applications… I could wax on about why this kind of compatibility is important, what we have been doing to make sure your apps keep working, how side-by-side really helps here, why editors use sensational headlines etc. But I thought in the age of a fully democratic and organic press I would leave this to you. Rather than believe me, or the vagaries of the press… why not gather our own data and compare notes!

So, here is my invitation to get involved in an open reporting of compatibility issues. Here is what you do.

Step 1: Read through Compatibility Testing Scenarios

Step 2: Do the 5 tests it suggests (or any subset you have time for)

Step 3: Blog your results and tell us what you think! Good or bad, blog it out (be sure to also fill out the survey for our internal bean counting too)

I am sure there will be some apps that the platform fails on, for those be sure to submit a bug… I want to make sure we address as many of those as we can before we ship. I am also equally sure some apps just work…

Thanks and let the challenge begin!

Morning Edition on Blogging

BradA — Fri, 20 May 2005 08:18:00 GMT

NPR’s Morning Edition (RSS) has a good spot on blogging this morning. It reminded me of a debate Peter and I had about blogging a while back. Does blogging take more deep thinking than other forms of public writing (articles, books, etc) or less?

I tend to agree with the Catherine… In my line of work, it is way easier for me to get someone to “blog out” an answer, best practice or bit of data than it is to get them to do the needful to get the same information in the docs, on MSDN, etc.

I hope that you can simply grep the web and find those nuggets.

Get email updates for new posts and new comments

BradA — Wed, 06 Apr 2005 08:50:00 GMT

I am sure many of you knew this, but with the brand-spanking-new CommunityServer stuff you can get an email every time I post or a comment is made. Sure makes it easier to follow the discussion. Just click on the “email” link to the left or here…

Blog Day: BCL team does the blog challenge...

BradA — Thu, 10 Mar 2005 05:12:00 GMT

The BCL team has laid down the blog challenge… On next Tuesday the goal is for the whole team to do nothing but blog all day. Knowing this team, I am sure you will be impressed with what they come up with, both in volume and quality.

Kit’s taking suggests\ideas now..

weblogs.asp.net/ aliased to blogs.msdn.com/

BradA — Tue, 08 Feb 2005 22:56:00 GMT

I am sure many of you know this, but I recently told someone and they were surprised to learn that any Microsoft employee blogging on weblogs.asp.net can be accessed via blogs.msdn.com.

So for example..

http://weblogs.asp.net/cbrumme == http://blogs.msdn.com/cbrumme

Enjoy!

Color-Coded Source code in blogs

BradA — Wed, 06 Oct 2004 04:02:00 GMT

Someone recently asked me how I do the color coding of source code in my blog. Well, it is really very simple. I do my work in VS 2005 Express and then cut and paste it into word (an email actually), then cut and paste that into a blog entry… and presto… nicely formatted, color source code to blog about…. Enjoy!

class Program

{

static void Main(string[] args)

{

Console.ForegroundColor = ConsoleColor.Red;

Console.WriteLine("Hello World!");

}

Scott helps us fight back against the comment spammers...

BradA — Sun, 08 Aug 2004 03:19:00 GMT

I really hate comment spammers, they really ruin a great forum for the rest of us. I am glad to see that Scott has just armed us with some new weapons to help out. I turned on the comment moderation to test it out and see how it goes. I admit it is a bit of a speedbump for most of you folks, but I hope it will not slow down the conversation too much… at least now you’ll know I “sorta” read each post ;-)

Ahh, I also notice a nicer editing experince... thanks Scott!

What do you think? Will this be enough?

Joe Duffy joins the CLR team

BradA — Sun, 11 Jul 2004 04:06:00 GMT

I have been negligent in announcing that Joe Duffy recently joined the CLR team to focus on bringing WinFX together. As you can see from his blog, he is starting to settle in. What would you like to see Joe take on in the WinFX, Design Guidelines, managed code space? I can’t promise I will do it, but I always like to hear your thoughts.

As an aside, I think it is amazing how blogs are changing the way this industry works… Even though I was not hiring for a blog-for-a-living kind of job (a la Scoble), Joe and I still hooked up because of blogs. He already knew a ton about the kind of job he would be taking and I knew about the kind of person I was hiring. Interesting to think about how your blog is a living resume for you… what does your blog say about you?

Well, it is that time again: Reviews!

BradA — Wed, 23 Jun 2004 03:51:00 GMT

ChrisAn posted about the process in general last year, so I will not bore you with it. But one of the things I do as a manager is talk to people that my team has interacted with over the period and get their feedback. This time the specific question I used was:

I would value your feedback on {0}.. What areas of contribution are especially noteworthy? What are some growth areas for {0}?

Feedback by end of week would be most helpful.

I got to thinking why not ask you? After all making you unbelievably, ecstatically happy and productive on our platform is pretty much the main job (in one way or another) of all the MSFT bloggers.

So, I suggest we declare tomorrow the “unofficial international feedback on MSFT bloggers day”! Take a few seconds and drop a line to the MSFT bloggers you read regularly and let them know what you value most from their efforts and suggest some areas for growth. If you’d like drop the comments to me and I will see to it the feedback gets directly to the blogger’s manager.

BTW, on my direct team – Krzysztof and Joel have blogs and Kit is a frequent contributor to the BCL blog.

Thanks for your feedback!