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May 2004 - Posts

Another MS Executive Started Blogging Last Night. Welcome Soma!

Posted Friday, May 28, 2004 9:16 AM by jledgard
Soma , who reports to Eric Rudder and now runs the Developer Division, started his blog last night. He was even brave enough to turn on comments that go straight to his inbox! I've been in a couple of meetings with Soma now in addition to his first “All Read More...
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Customers Overrun VS Core Team Hallway

Posted Thursday, May 27, 2004 3:37 PM by jledgard
Chad asked for your picture and some details about how you use the product we build every day. Last week he took what he has received so far, printed the results, and tacked them to one of the walls on the 5th floor. Today he figured out how to use an Read More...
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High Praise for Tech-Ed Community from a Java Guy

Posted Thursday, May 27, 2004 3:17 PM by jledgard
So I didn't make the trip to Tech-Ed this year, but I do get to read everything about it. Via Eking I found this entry from a Java developer ( N. Alex Rupp ) attending Tech-Ed. I've included some choice quotes. TechEd 2004, Day 01 I must admit, it was Read More...
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Are "Team Blogs" the "Anti-Blog"?

Posted Thursday, May 27, 2004 1:37 PM by jledgard
I used to feel this way. If someone had asked me a few months ago if I thought their team should start a blog that represents their collective team; I probably would has told them that it wouldn't go over that well. Now, however, I'm of the opinion that Read More...
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VSCmdShell Update (cmd.exe integration into VS Shell)

Posted Thursday, May 27, 2004 8:50 AM by jledgard
Ok, so I had hoped to have actually had a release by now . I really am getting closer. Check out the latest pic... So I probably could have released something by now if I'd chosen to leverage a 3rd party auto-complete control rather than write my own. Read More...
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Mark Cuban on Being an Information Junkie

Posted Tuesday, May 25, 2004 9:45 PM by jledgard
If you haven't subscribed yet you should be reading Mark Cuban's blog. His series on "Success and Motivation" has been great stuff. Part 4, posted today, was pretty timely for me since I had a conversation over lunch with a former report about the value Read More...
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Going to Extra Mile to Ensure Good Support

Posted Tuesday, May 25, 2004 8:49 PM by jledgard
This was forwarded to me today from YAG . It shows how important it can be to listen to customer issues (no matter where they come from) and provide swift resolutions. Calvin Hsia, a dev lead on VFP, posted a blog entry about bad customer support he was Read More...
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Support the Comment API or I Won't Comment

Posted Tuesday, May 25, 2004 7:59 PM by jledgard
Support the comment API. Support it so I can read and reply to comments about your post. Support it from your blog and support it from your blog reading software. Scoble is hardheaded about full-text support in RSS . I happen to agree with his perspective, Read More...
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Responding to a VSS Bug Report

Posted Tuesday, May 25, 2004 3:03 PM by jledgard
The community wins just keep coming across my desk today. Perhaps that’s because I sent out a request for them… Came across a very nice post to reference during your community report as a good customer experience: Subject: Archive/Restore Read More...
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My Favorite Developer Powertoys

Posted Tuesday, May 25, 2004 2:56 PM by jledgard
Chris Asks : I just now discovered the Power Toys link and I am very excited about learning more. I am interested in NUnit and I plan to check out the NUnit Add In. What are some Power Toys that you like in particular? Or what would be good ones to start Read More...
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RE: Just wanted to say thanks!

Posted Tuesday, May 25, 2004 1:46 PM by jledgard
This was forwarded to me today. I'll add my thanks to everyone at Microsoft that is currently making the time to get to know their customers a little better and share their insights and expertise outside of our corporate boundaries. I'll also add that Read More...
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Welcome Messages from Visual Studio Team System PUMs (The Head Honchos)

Posted Monday, May 24, 2004 2:55 PM by jledgard
So every other blog you read today probably has information in it about the Visual Studio 2005 Team System software that was announced today @ Tech-Ed. I think Chris Sells has the best round-up of must read links about Team System so far so I won't try Read More...
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RE: Use your cameraphone as a scanner for online grocery shopping

Posted Monday, May 24, 2004 12:55 PM by jledgard
It will be cool to see how well this actually works. It might actually be a reasonable use for those otherwise meaningless cameras you can't seem to find a phone without these days. Online grocery store PeaPod.com is working on a clever way for people Read More...
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One Community Win at a Time

Posted Monday, May 24, 2004 9:19 AM by jledgard
While encouraging teams @ MS to participate in online communities I'm often asked “What do I get out of it?” or “What will my teams ROI be?”. Honestly guys... those are the wrong questions, but here is some non-numeric proof that Read More...
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I, for one, welcome our new SPAM overlords

Posted Saturday, May 22, 2004 12:40 AM by jledgard
Today is the day I deleted an alias created for the Powertoys blog because I made the mistake of publicly asking people to send mail to it. For some reason, our internal spam filtering didn’t seem to be working as well for this alias as it does Read More...
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Blog Conversation Lifecycle

Posted Friday, May 21, 2004 10:12 AM by jledgard
I spotted an interesting commentary on the lifecycle of a blog discussion over Simon Phipp's blog. I think its one good way to look at it. I do think there are some things that could be done to make conversing about a blog topic easier on the actual blog Read More...
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Frustrated with the Visual Studio HTML Editor changing your HTML

Posted Thursday, May 20, 2004 7:30 PM by jledgard
Generally, one of the first questions I get when I tell people I work on Visual Studio is "Why does it keep changing my HTML?" Well, that's the less colorful version of the question. Mikhail Arkhipov posted the best public explination of this "feature" Read More...
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Chad Sends His Love and Decorates our Halls

Posted Thursday, May 20, 2004 7:06 PM by jledgard
I think this whole thing was pretty cool... A few days ago, I invited you to let me know who you are. On behalf of the folks on the VS team , I want to thank all of you who responded to me, sent me a note, a picture, a bio, a resume, or even just an electronic Read More...
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ESPN RSS Feeds!

Posted Wednesday, May 19, 2004 5:11 PM by jledgard
Awesome... now I can get the latest baseball news mixed in with my blog reading. Via Scoble Via Dave Winer Via David Thomson : ESPN.com news ESPN.com NFL News ESPN.com NBA News ESPN.com NHL News ESPN.com MLB News Good Times! Read More...
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Updated Threaded Discussion Opinion Result Tally... Still Do Nothing?

Posted Wednesday, May 19, 2004 1:48 PM by jledgard
On 5/7 I posted the first tally of results for how people would prefer their Beta 1 threaded discussions . There have been some additional comments and votes made since then so it seemed only fair to add those in. Ironically, this thread in the newsgroups Read More...
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Show Sara your Support for Multi-Monitor Development

Posted Tuesday, May 18, 2004 1:38 PM by jledgard
I've personally heard a bunch of conflicting statements regarding how popular Multi-Monitor development is. I couldn't live without it. Tell us how you feel on Sara's blog . I want to get a sense of how many people use Visual Studio with a mulit-monitor Read More...
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Using the Whidbey CTP Bits on Longhorn 4074

Posted Tuesday, May 18, 2004 11:02 AM by jledgard
I know there has been some disappointment that Whidbey is not yet working on the latest longhorn builds. Today I found this. I'll second the "try at your own risk" sentiment since I can tell you that there has been no internal testing of this scenario. Read More...
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Lost Post - We want your picture!

Posted Monday, May 17, 2004 11:55 AM by jledgard
Seems that this never got posted after it was written. Anyway I wrote it again... Send Chad your picture . We do a lot of promotion of .Net built apps in our hallways, but less about the customers who build these apps. This is your chance to have your Read More...
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But wouldn't it be great if... VSCmdShell Progress

Posted Saturday, May 15, 2004 1:24 PM by jledgard
I spent Thursday night with the VSCmdShell code. Having just released v0.6 that now defaults to the VS environment paths I was determined to clean some stuff up before the next release. I refactored the code a bunch to make it more readable, I made issuing Read More...
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Exclusive First Look: Add New Online Templates... or other community components in VS 2005

Posted Friday, May 14, 2004 3:34 PM by jledgard
You won't even see this stuff in the next tech preview drop! Marie , who works on my team, has been doing some PM work around easily pulling community content into Visual Studio. I think of this as enabling VS to be a more living product. Anyway, I asked Read More...
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Living in Your World and Listening to Theirs

Posted Thursday, May 13, 2004 10:57 AM by jledgard
One thing I started noticing about Microsoft blogs (and yes, there are expectations) is that we do a pretty good job of giving customers our information, but not as good a job of highlighting good customer contributions. The result is that it feels like Read More...
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New MS Testing Tool for Verifying Accessibility Now Available

Posted Tuesday, May 11, 2004 9:15 PM by jledgard
Sara publicly released MSAAVerify today. She has been working on it part time for two years and I know is excited to have “shipped“ it. This tool has recently been picked up by several teams at Microsoft for verifying the accessibility of Read More...
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Who writes their blog in pink text?

Posted Tuesday, May 11, 2004 8:51 PM by jledgard
Eric Lippert does. Today he answered some of the popular google questions that led to his blog. You know, from my previous entries , that I always find these amusing. Enjoy - Josh “What make my eyes hurt when I open them in the morning? Your planet Read More...
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Does Visual Studio .Net startup, load, or open slowly for you?

Posted Saturday, May 08, 2004 10:16 PM by jledgard
I've started seeing google queries where people seem to be having issues with Visual Studio loading slowly. There are a few things that could be causing this and some things you can do to help. I've talked a lot previously about various issues with virus Read More...
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Goals for Community Tech Previews

Posted Saturday, May 08, 2004 8:50 PM by jledgard
Mark, my boss, posted a long article that explains the intent and direction of the CTP program. Here are some choice quotes and some of my own comments... Our ideal is that every build is publicly available. Another way to say it is that we want to enable Read More...
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Sometimes the Answers Find You

Posted Saturday, May 08, 2004 7:59 PM by jledgard
I spent part of Thursday looking for quotes from customers that suggested improved satisfaction with Microsoft becuase of the openness and community participation embarked upon by MS employees. Afterall, a large part of this is about building and improving Read More...
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Threaded Discussion Opinion Result Tally... Do Nothing?

Posted Friday, May 07, 2004 11:37 AM by jledgard
Yesterday I started a rather unscientific polling of how people would like their Visual Studio 2005 talk once a more public Beta is released. I also posted the question to the newsgroups that exist today . So far, I've received 10 pieces of feedback. Read More...
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Choices Choices Choices for Whidbey Beta 1 Discussions

Posted Thursday, May 06, 2004 2:42 PM by jledgard
If you read my blog then you know I've been doing a bunch of work that will hopefully result in a more unified , trustworthy, threaded discussion solution for Microsoft as a whole. Your comments have been helping a lot so far, but until we have a swanky Read More...
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Sara Comments on Women in Computer Science

Posted Thursday, May 06, 2004 2:12 PM by jledgard
Watching the blogosphere of late you have most likely noticed the discussions surrounding women, or the lack there of, in computer science related jobs. Its amazes me how many men are arguing about this and offering their insights. I don't want to add Read More...
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Question of the Day - NNTP Integration with Outlook

Posted Monday, May 03, 2004 10:58 AM by jledgard
I've seen some posts on different plug ins for Outlook that enable NNTP integration. Does anyone have any opinions on which ones are best? Thank - Josh Read More...
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Portable Video Devices = Bad Times?

Posted Saturday, May 01, 2004 11:10 AM by jledgard
I found these quotes from Steve Jobs via the channel9 forums . Jobs essentially discusses the problems with trying to market a portable video player and makes the case that if you did make one it should ideally be designed to hook into a larger screen Read More...
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