Jack Gudenkauf (JackG) WebLog : Personal

Microsoft - The Economy, ThinkWeek, Innovation,...

JackG — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 22:42:00 GMT

In my last post I mentioned my new role in the Microsoft Technical Strategy group and the promise of more on the subject. So here is some late breaking news, hot of the press, on one of our programs – ThinkWeek.

Context - Economic Realities

We are all effected (some more than others) by the current World economic conditions and Microsoft is no exception. The news is full of comparisons to the economic crisis in the early 80’s. This current economic down turn brings back some painful personal memories. I graduated from Dowling High School in West Des Moines, Iowa (Home of the best Steak, Corn and Wrestlers in the World) in 1981. Damn, I’m getting old, but like fine wine … After graduation, I soon lost my Father who was a tremendous influence in my life and shaped my core values - Honesty, Integrity, Work hard and be a man of your word to a name a few. I married at the age of 20 in 1983 and I became a father myself (hard to imagine). The stress of trying to provide for a new family during one of America’s most difficult economic down turns since the depression was a tremendous burden. Iowa was so depressed that I couldn’t find a minimum wage job, even at the typically hiring establishments like McDonald’s. And believe me, when I tell you, that eating government cheese, peanut butter and a meal about every other day (those years of Wrestling paid off when dealing with hunger) makes a job at McDonald’s seem like a glorious thing when you could have had a double cheeseburger with fries *and* be employed. What a treat that would have been.

I typically keep my personal life separate from my professional life, but I wanted to share some personal experiences as they are reflective of these difficult times. As you may have read, Microsoft recently went through a second wave of cut backs in response to the economy. Our team survived, but we lost some very good people as well as some of our program offerings. My thoughts and prayers continue to go out to many of those I know who are experiencing the difficulties I lived through in the early 80’s. Hang in there. This too shall pass.

Context - What is ThinkWeek?

As borrowed from my peer, Tricia Mayer, our much more articulate and capable Director of Marketing and Communications.

“ThinkWeek is a long-standing tradition at Microsoft, initiated by Bill Gates. Over the years, ideas generated through ThinkWeek papers have inspired direction and great thinking. Now that Bill has moved on to a more prominent role at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the ThinkWeek process is changing.

ThinkWeek is an open and voluntary forum that enables any Microsoft employee to share their thoughts and ideas in the form of a thoughtfully written paper, circulated among influential managers and senior leaders.

ThinkWeek is grounded in the premise that sharing diverse ideas and great thinking are key elements of maintaining our competitive advantage and thought leadership around the world.”

ThinkWeek and the Economy

Again from Tricia,

“As all groups at Microsoft undergo the evaluation of cost to value benefit for programs and projects, we are also applying the same scrutiny to the ThinkWeek program and process. Until that evaluation process is complete, the ThinkWeek09 cycle has been placed on hold.”

I was made aware there was some leaking (outside of Microsoft) of this programs “hold” status, so I felt now was the time (read below) to share some information on the subject from someone (Me) who has first hand information on the subject. Note that we received a lot of feedback from employees on the ThinkWeek “hold” status.

I believe the ThinkWeek concept has been around for ~27years. It has been a long standing tradition embraced by Bill Gates and was affectionately referred to as “the BillG ThinkWeek”, in part, because Bill would take a week off to read the papers and incorporate the input into the fabric of Microsoft’s product development. I doubt Bill truly unplugged. Remind me to tell you a personal experience that has become an urban legend on Bill’s work ethic.

On a personal note, In April 2001, I submitted a paper on MSN’s .Net Migration – “Porting a Multi-tier Distributed Platform”, with a little help from my friends (shout out to Mahesh and Stephen). The paper was based on the re-architecture of our content fetching/aggregation tool I invented and originally wrote in Perl and ported to “Cool”, which was the code name for C#. Participating in a program that allows you to reach thought leaders and influencers throughout Microsoft was (is) a privilege and an honor. Seriously! I make mention of this, along with my Microsoft ship-it awards, on my resume.

Signs of recovery

There is more positive news about the economy recovering and while certainly not the sole decision to launch the *new* ThinkWeek program, both are positive signs in my mind.

Yesterday, Ray Ozzie, announced in his Engineering Excellence forum keynote (a Microsoft campus event) that the new ThinkWeek program will launch next month!

And again,

“Over the past several months, the ThinkWeek program has been redesigned based on the feedback we have heard from Microsoft employees worldwide. The next generation of the ThinkWeek program will be launching on July 6, 2009.”

In conclusion

For those Microsoft employees reading this blog, submit those thoughtful papers and please give me feedback on the new site.

For those that read about the leaked information this should clear things up.

For those that are hearing about ThinkWeek for the first time, this should give you some insight into some Microsoft culture, employee participation in shaping Microsoft, and continued support for invention, innovation, and feedback by *all* employees.

I will continue to share more on the Technical Strategy Group programs (in additional to ThinkWeek) as well as more on innovation and Microsoft culture if my readers find the subjects interesting. Do inquiring minds want to know?

Now I have to get back to work as I recently picked up a number of new work items, requirements, expectations, and a firm ThinkWeek RTW date J

"Lost" and found

JackG — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 20:46:00 GMT

Where have you been? Assuming I haven’t lost all my readers by now, due to my silence, this seems to be a reasonable question.

Does anyone out there watch “Lost”? I ended up getting hooked in the beginning and now I can’t avert my eyes.

As I wrote this blog, I felt the “Lost” series seemed to be analogous on a few dimensions ;-) The story line seems to do this Present, Past, Present (and now Future) transition. The show seems to be popular enough, so why not use the theme.

The Present

· Beginning in December 2008 (a few months ago), I was fortunate enough to land one of the best jobs I have ever had (and hope to have/retain – scary times we live in).

· I am now back in a managerial role as the Group Manager for the Technical Strategy Engineering team reporting to the office of the CTO. The SVP CTO, David Vaskevitch, has quite a distinguished career spanning the creation of MCS (i.e., Microsoft Consulting Services) to building many teams in SQL (e.g., MTS, COM+,..) and I believe he was also Bill Gate’s first TA. At this juncture, I have had only one meeting with David, but I was impressed on many levels. David reports through Ray Ozzie, who is the Chief Software Architect, and is someone that most people think of, as the “new” Bill Gates.

· My new role is typically called a Product Unit Manager. I have a team of Program Managers, Developers, and Testers. More on my new role later. Remember the “Lost” analogy.

The Past

· First I would like to apologize for my absence in the blogosphere but I was busy wrapping things up on the CLR team wrt Extensibility and the System.AddIn BCL.

· I suppose I could have started from my last blog post in time, but I think I’ll back up a bit in order to give a little context and some insight into my life’s journey and how my blog reflects that journey. Zen has returned to my life J. Side note – highly recommended reading: Zen in the martial Arts, a great concise book with pearls of wisdom I use often in my life and career.

· As I decided to try this blogging thing years ago, I was looking for a theme, a subject, something with continuity. I first started with “Smart Client”, then everything .Net. I wrote about Tools, Extensibility, Add-in’s, Versioning, etc..

o OK, so I have finally realized what my blog is really about. Drum roll please - And it is…. This is where a “Lost” episode would end. Keeping you in suspense. Oh, and there would be some hard pounding beat of music as well – dunt, dunt, da.

· Maybe it’s with maturity, experience, time, age (arg, age) that I finally realized as of this writing that my blog is about my career and life’s journey. I guess in some respects it is a journal or diary of sorts. I often wondered why anyone would care what I’m doing or have done, but I think there is value in sharing ones experiences so that others may (?) benefit. I’m still not sure about that Twitter or Facebook thing though. But I didn’t get blogging in the beginning either. Sure, I understand the Social Networking value, but honestly, who would care what I’m doing right now. <tweet> I’m on a plane coming back from London after visiting MS Research in Cambridge (cool stuff) and I’m writing a blog post </tweet>.

· As evidenced by my time as an Architect on the CLR team (i.e., .Net framework, Common Language Runtime, BCL – Base Class Libraries) I was pretty focused on the difficult Computer Science problems of; Extensibility, Versioning, Isolation, reliability, Security, etc.. And thus my blog posts reflected this period and passion for helping customers (i.e., primarily ISV/VAR/SI) who wrestle with these issues. It was a very challenging set of subject areas that I pursued, beginning when I was the Group Development Manager for the Visual Studio for Office/Applications group.

· So what brought me to the CLR team? Inquiring minds want to know. And that’s how that whole “Lost” thing works – Pieces parts you need to tie together. When I decided I was ready to leave the VSTO/A product unit I began looking around the company for challenging opportunities. In one my interviews with the SQL team, I spoke with a wise (now retired) man who asked what I believe in. Aside from my religious beliefs, I said “I always ask myself, what can I do to make our customers lives easier and what can I do to have the greatest impact for Microsoft.” Of which he replied, “so what are you doing about that?” Damn, those wise people (Zen). They get right to it, don’t they. Bring me a problem *and* a solution. As I discussed my recent work on trying to resolve these hard CS problems I mentioned I felt compelled to drive them to some level of conclusion for our customers but it was clear that the solution and current VSTA implementation needed to be available to a customer base beyond the VSTO/A products. He agreed 100% and said this was one of the biggest .Net issues and concerns for SQL (relative to .Net). He then told me I had an obligation to Microsoft and our customers to drive this effort. He told me I needed to speak with David Treadwell, the then VP of the CLR, in order to transfer this charter to their team. Right, I’ll just phone up a VP! Well, to make a long story short, that’s what I did. David was very approachable and along with moving over the charter, I also moved from a managerial role on VSTO/A to an Architect role in the Program Management discipline on the CLR team. To be clear, it took more than a phone call J

Recent Past

One of the benefits of working for Microsoft is the breadth of opportunities available within the company. To be clear, internal hiring/recruiting is pretty much treated the same as external hiring. That is, you might think your experience within the company would stand on its own, but you still have to apply for the job, go through several interviews for each job, just as though you were new to the company. After all, you’re new to the new team. I think it’s important to know this, as I often get questions about what it’s like working for Microsoft (everyone says I should write a book). To give you as sense of what it’s like, I can tell you that I had somewhere in the neighborhood of ~40 interviews for various jobs during my last/recent search. And around 9 interviews for my current job. These interviews ranged the gambit of the old, “What is your greatest strength” to “write me a doubly linked list at the whiteboard”

Ok, I’m sorry, but I have to go off on a tangent here - For crying out loud, aside from writing a linked list in school, who has ever had to write one since graduating? If you can’t explain the importance of data structures then there is a reasonable concern. But, I have forgotten more than most will learn in their careers. No, I’m not any smarter, I am just seasoned, mature, experienced. Ok, ok, I’ve been around a long time ;-) </rant>.

But I digress.

Where was I?

Right. I was searching for a job when I decided to leave the CLR team.

A season ending episode.

Time Sequence (Season recap)

Ok, so “Lost” periodically brings together the time line, so let’s do that before we lose our sanity.

1. Jack moves from the Development Manager of the MSN platform team to VSTO/A.

2. Jack was Group Dev. Manager of VSTO/A when he decided to start blogging.

3. Aside from the VSTO/A products, he discovered the need for .Net versioning, Isolation, etc..

4. He drives moving the VSTA extensibility technology/charter to the CLR team and moves over to the CLR team as an Architect working with ISV’s on the Add-In model.

5. Blogs a lot about the subject.

6. Then moves to the Technical Strategy Group.

Hey, wait a minute! What happened to the System.AddIn stuff you left behind?

· This whole “Lost” theme gets confusing doesn’t it? Definitely the last time I use it. Or is it? I think the “Lost” writers make it up as they go along.

· So what happened to all the ISV and Add-In work we heard so much about? What are you actually doing now?

o Stay tuned J

Microsoft announcement of Silverlight 2 (Devices/RIA/Client)

JackG — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 00:04:00 GMT

Yesterday, Microsoft announced a significant technology advancement in Rich Internet Application (RIA) platform development.

This announcement was significant on many levels from my perspective.

It solidifies (beyond SL 1) the ability to use .Net to develop richer (beyond video and media) web client applications. As you may know, I have had strong opinions on the previous Web development experience (Thin Client - Web Clients).
It clearly shows our effort in meeting customer demands to provide a continuum and compatibility of development environments from Devices to Web and Rich/Smart Client applications. Check out Scott Guthrie's blog post with sample code.
Providing VS designer support and very rich Expression Studio support for the above. This will further empower designers to build rich client applications with WPF and rich media/RIA experiences with Silverlight.

Check out the Mix08 site for more details, including the keynote.

Some of the coolest things I saw were:

The Hard Rock Café demo of zooming in and out of media images and retaining resolution. WPF rocks!
The upcoming Olympics media experience was unbelievable. The demo of multiple channels on the screen, the ability to rewind real time events and PIP (Picture In Picture). Unbelievable. Sniff, sniff, I miss my ability to do PIP on my TV. Sad that with High Def, etc... I had to give up on one of the coolest features I once had.
Silverlights ability to adjust the streaming experience based on my ever changing connectivity bandwidth was to cool for school.

One other note. I watched the keynote live from my desktop and I couldn't help but wonder how the audience could sit their so quietly when so many cool things were being shown on real bits. We aren't talking vapor or demo-ware here. I haven't been directly involved in the SL development effort and granted I work at Microsoft so I likely bring some bias, and I guess I am more excitable than your average person about where we landed on the ability to develop applications in a very compatible way from devices to Web to Rich Client applications (and maybe I had some influence) but can someone tell me why the audience was not as engaged. I mean, PIP - come on people, that's cool stuff! In any event, as a developer/consumer I am thrilled, as a contributor I am proud, and as a user I don't expect I will leave my DVI flat panel dual monitors during the Olympics.

I would love to get your thoughts on where we hit or missed the mark. Enjoy!

TechEd 2007 F.A.Q.

JackG — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 03:38:00 GMT

Hola!

I just returned from TechEd 2007 held in Barcelona, Spain. Barcelona is a beautiful city with incredible new and old architecture. The people are very friendly and even I was able to navigate the clean public transportation systems. Yes, I am one of those people that get lost easily and never stop to ask for directions. I was surprisingly given a beautiful suite overlooking the Mediterranean at the Hilton Diagonal Mar hotel right next to the convention center. I would highly recommend the hotel! Ask for a suite above the 15^thfloor in order to take advantage of the 15^th floor amenities!

I could go on and on about Barcelona, but I wanted to provide some links answering some of the F.A.Q.'s I received.

1. Does the Add-In model support UI extensibility via WPF? Yes, check out my Channel 9 video, as well as the sample code.

2. What is the state of Acropolis? Answer.

3. What about the PAG CAB (WPF and Acropolis)? Answer

4. Does the Add-In model support *in* domain activation, Click-once, custom meta-data, simple sandboxing, WPF isolation, and AddIn to AddIn communication? Yes, these features were added in the final Beta. Check out the “By popular demand link”.

5. Can you tell me more about the WPF Add-In support (e.g., XBAP)? Here is the WPF blog site link.

6. Where do I post WPF control specific Add-In questions? Here is a link.

7. Do you support Out of process activation and isolation of Add-Ins? Do you support Partial Trust Add-Ins in an external process? Can I have some control over the process? Yes, Yes, and Yes. Here is a link to some sample code showing how easy it is.

8. Can you tell me more about VSTA and the differences and/or reconciliation with the CLR Add-In model? Check out these links.

9. What are the rules/constraints of the types that may flow over the boundary? Here is a link to the contract constraints.

10. Where are the Add-In MSDN articles? Here are the links.

11. What about WinForms support? Who do I contact about this support? What about Crossbow? Check out these links and comments; WinForms and MAF link, Crossbow link.

12. Can you do Async programming in MAF? Yes, check out this link.

13. What about ill behaved Add-Ins and unhandled exceptions? Here is a link.

14. Do you have sample code showing Host automation and Events? Yes, check out this link.

15. Where do I get Add-In support? Here is a link.

16. Can you show me more pictures and less text? Can you tell more about the “Pipeline”? Can you show me some sample code for version tolerance, i.e., backward compatibility that supports something stronger than the use of a standard Interface or Abstract base class implementation. Here is a link for all the above questions.

17. Can the Add-In model be used as a dynamic component composition model? Yes! In some respects it was tragic that we used such a contextual naming convention of Host and Add-In, as opposed to component, composition, or automation. I will be posting a sample application that shows the new Beta2 features we added and you will see the basis for a component model within the sample, as well as some code answering another F.A.Q. about the management of components/Add-Ins. Stay tuned to this same bat channel.

If I missed one of your questions please let me know. For those that I met at the conference, thank you for your support and thoughtful questions as well as the positive feedback and strong session scores (the checks in the mail ;-)

And for those that know me, I did make it to the WPT Barcelona casino for poker. The stakes were a little high for my taste and the players were quite good, but I managed to do well. Playing with people from Israel, Spain, and Holland, to name a few, was a cultural experience I will never forget.

Gràcies, Gracias, Merci

Is that Brad Pitt on www.wevegottaguy.com?

JackG — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 04:38:00 GMT

Check out http://www.wevegottaguy.com/ and see if you recognize that handsome guy representing the Small Business Specialists ;-) The videos on the right hand side are pretty darn funny. Pure Improve! It was a pleasure working with these skilled actors in these skits. Apparently my videos are coming soon, or on the cutting room floor L

Microsoft recently launched a brand awareness campaign for the Microsoft Small Business Specialist Program. This is a U.S. wide campaign containing multiple different elements: Online videos, web banners & web buttons on small business websites, press releases, the www.WeveGottaGuy.com website, online news agencies, and more. The campaign is called the, "We've Gotta Guy," campaign and the premise behind it is simple. How many times have you been talking with a prospective client and been told, "We've Gotta Guy?" It could be their brother-in-law, a friend, a colleague's nephew from college, whatever. Whoever "the guy" is, they are betting their critical business systems on them and putting their businesses at risk. So we are reaching out to small businesses through a variety of ways to convey the message that there is professional assistance available to them in their local areas to help with their critical business systems and they are the Microsoft Small Business Specialists. The call to action, look for the Microsoft Small Business Specialist "badge."

Jack Gudenkauf's (JackG) Bio

JackG — Thu, 06 Apr 2006 00:36:00 GMT

Jack Gudenkauf has been a software professional since 1986. He is currently working for Microsoft as a Software Architect on the .Net Framework and Common Language Runtime. He is currently focused on engaging with ISV/VAR/SI customers in order to ascertain .Net architectural adoption issues and provide solutions via the platform. His experiences include; Development Manager, MIS Director, software engineering, and consulting services. His consulting company, "The Logical Choice", serviced clients such as America West Airlines, Nordstrom, the State of Washington, and Microsoft from 1990-1998. He has been a full time employee with Microsoft since 1998 working in IT, MSN, and the Developer Divisions.

If you are interested in reading his thoughts on ISV's/VAR's/SI's, .Net, Smart Clients, the WinFX Addin model or Visual Studio, check out his blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/JackG/ or via RSS at http://blogs.msdn.com/jackg/rss.aspx