scooblog by josh ledgard : Collaborative Development

Google makes your code prettier

jledgard — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 19:21:06 GMT

Something I'd love to see Microsoft do more of is small, simple, solutions to annoying problems that would delight customers. Here is a perfect example.

Google Gode Prettifier

A simple Javascript and CSS file, the Google Code Prettifier makes syntax highlighting in a web document super easy. It's pretty flexible too. According to the project page, the lexer involved will correctly highlight code written in C, Java, Python, Bash, SQL, HTML, XML, CSS, Javascript, and Makefiles.

Something you don't see everyday at Microsoft

jledgard — Sat, 10 Mar 2007 00:27:11 GMT

Source: Sara Ford's WebLog : Influencing the Microsoft culture one open source presentation at a time

The thing I love most about my job is being creative in how I’m trying to get an idea or message across, especially when it comes down to challenging the Microsoft culture. So, it’s probably a safe bet that no one has ever seen a sign like this before on Redmond campus:

Strong free one two combination for creating localized applications

jledgard — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 00:21:10 GMT

So you started your application and now realize you've hardcoded strings and you need to start offering localized version. There are two freely available tools you can use to help with this transition.

Step One: Remove hardcoded strings and put them in resource files.

Our team released the 1.0 version of the Resource Refactoring tool last month.

Step 2: Generate Translated Resource Files

Jeremy recently discovered this tool.

ResEx is the composite, translation friendly .NET Resource editor.

Enjoy!

Testing Community Based Open Source projects for corporations

jledgard — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 04:41:30 GMT

John's blog postings on testing open source projects where recently picked up by Mary Jo. Not bad PR for the work our team has been doing and good lessons to read if your team is looking at taking components open.

Our team has learned many lessons about the open source world since we released our first power toy to an open source site. Since that first release, we have had bug reports, feature requests, and code contributions. My suggestions below are based on our team’s experience. I hope you find my thoughts useful.

Source: John D'Addamio's blog : Recommendations for corporate teams developing Community Based Open Source projects

2006 Microsoft Developer Out of Box Releases

jledgard — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 04:24:00 GMT

So Visual Studio 2005 shipped last year. We shipped a service pack in 2006, but in addition to working onthe service pack and the next version of Visual Studio team's in Developer Division have also shipped a lot of cool stuff "out of box". Here is a quick list I put together...

Update #2: Forgot to mention that the latest book by James Avery and Jim Holmes "Windows Developer Power Tools" is now availible. It features some of the earlier contributions from our team on this list.

AJAX Control Toolkit

http://www.codeplex.com/AtlasControlToolkit

The AJAX Control Toolkit is a joint project between the community and Microsoft. Built upon the ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX Extensions, the Toolkit aims to be the biggest and best collection of web-client components available.

Pack Installer

http://www.codeplex.com/PackInstaller

Beta 2 just shipped today! The Pack Installer is a tool that will let you see the latest Power Toys for Visual Studio, and other great developer oriented tools. It allows you to easily mark any tool or set of tools for download and installation, and streamline the installation process.

MSBuild Extras - Toolkit for .NET 1.1 "MSBee"

http://www.codeplex.com/MSBee

MSBuild Extras – Toolkit for .NET 1.1 “MSBee” is an addition to MSBuild that allows developers to build managed applications using Visual Studio 2005 projects that target .NET 1.1.

Resource Refactoring Tool

http://www.codeplex.com/ResourceRefactoring

Resource Refactoring Tool provides developers an easy way to extract hard coded strings from the code to resource files.

VSCmdShell 2005

http://www.codeplex.com/VSCmdShell

VSCmdShell provides users with a shell window inside the Visual Studio IDE that can be used for Visual Studio commands as well. Current version allows user to use either Windows Command Shell (cmd.exe) or Windows PowerShell.

Managed Stack Explorer

http://www.codeplex.com/MSE

Do you ever need to get stack traces for your .NET 2.0 applications? Want a quick and easy way to monitor managed processes and threads? Need a way to view a thread's stack trace to investigate an application hang? If so, Managed Stack Explorer is for you.

Microsoft Best Practices Analyzer w ASP.NET plugin

http://www.codeplex.com/BPAEngine

The Microsoft Best Practices Analyzer is an general-purpose engine that allows for a user to analyze settings in their systems to quickly identify problematic or sub-optimal configurations. The BPA tool comes preinstalled with an example plug-in for analyzes an ASP.Net 2.0 server and website's system.web configuration settings for problematic configurations.

VS 2005 IDE Enhancements

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=cd7c6e48-e41b-48e3-881e-a0e6e97f9534&DisplayLang=en

Visual Studio 2005 IDE Enhancements are a set of Visual Studio extensions that are designed to make you more productive. These enhancements are directly integrated into the Visual Studio IDE. This set of enhancements includes Source Code Outliner, Visual C++ Code Snippets, Indexed Find, Super Diff and Event Toaster tools.

TFS Power Toys

http://blogs.msdn.com/bharry/archive/2006/09/07/744993.aspx

We're trying something new with this Power Toy release. It's the first time where we have new features that integrate seamlessly into the VS2005 IDE and are virtually indistinguishable from any other TFS feature in the IDE.

Interop Forms Toolkit 1.0

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/vbasic/aa701259.aspx

The Interop Forms Toolkit 1.0 is a free add-in that simplifies the process of displaying .NET WinForms in a Visual Basic 6 application. Instead of upgrading the entire code base, these applications can now be extended one form at a time.

VB Power Pack

https://connect.microsoft.com/site/sitehome.aspx?wa=wsignin1.0&siteid=223

Visual Basic 2005 Power Packs may contain Add-Ins, Controls, Components, Tools or Samples for you to use with Visual Basic 2005 to make developing great applications even easier!

TFS Administration Tool

http://www.codeplex.com/TFSAdmin

The TFS Admin Tool allows a TFS administrator to quickly add users to all three platforms utilized by Team Foundation Server: Team Foundation Server, Sharepoint, and SQL Reporting Services, all through one common interface.

Update#1 IronPython!!

http://www.codeplex.com/IronPython

IronPython is a new implementation of the Python programming language running on .NET. It supports an interactive console with fully dynamic compilation. It is well integrated with the rest of the .NET Framework and makes all .NET libraries easily available to Python programmers, while maintaining full compatibility with the Python language.

Let me know if I missed anything!

Refactor String Resources to Resx Files in Vb.Net and C#

jledgard — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 21:43:41 GMT

Last week our team released the 1.0 beta of a new refactoring menu option for Visual Studio 2005. Bertan, the developer, has the details on his blog. The Resource Refactoring Tool provides developers an easy way to extract hard coded strings from the code to resource files.

We have finished working on the beta version of Resource Refactoring and just posted it to Codeplex. Also with this release Resource Refactoring Tool became a shared source project under MS-PL, so we have published the source code as well. If you want to help development of the tool please go to Getting Started with Development section on the project site.

New features and fixes for this release are:

ASP.Net web project support for C# and VB.Net code files. However your resource file must be located in App_GlobalResources directory otherwise no code is generated for it.

.....

Creating a simple multi-install package for your customers

jledgard — Wed, 08 Nov 2006 06:46:18 GMT

If you've downloaded something like the "Google Pack" in the past and wanted something like that for your companies products. Something that, with a small footprint, lets users pick and choose a suite of components to install, downloads the requested components on request, and installs them all in one swoop. Then I'd recommend you check out the "Power Toys Pack Installer" project on codeplex.

With the beta release of our Power Toys Pack Installer we've also released the source code! This means that you can check out how we've done this and leverage our work to build something similar for your companies components. We'd of course love, if you did this, to get some credit and perhaps some source code back. :-)

Even if you aren't interested in using this tool for your own needs you might want to use it to download the additional development tools released by Microsoft. We'll be constantly adding new releases to this list and I expect it to grow significantly over the next several months.

We've already had one happy customer.

"Please add more to the download and setup list. This is great!!"

If you have an idea for a Microsoft tool we should include... please let us know.

Office Prank Video: Developer + Igloo = Productivity

jledgard — Sat, 23 Sep 2006 00:19:00 GMT

In the middle of August Bertan took a 4 week vacation to get married. Well, as is a grand Microsoft tradition, we had to do something to his office. It took us two weeks to come up with the idea. In the end we went on a hunch and decide to build an igloo. This is the story of Bertan’s igloo…

Oh, and if you'd like to work with folks like this who build software... and sometimes other objects... check out the article that goes with this video here:

http://blogs.msdn.com/jledgard/articles/igloojobs.aspx

Footnotes:

The music was graciously donated by Jeremy Jones, who is a PM in Visual Studio land. You can get more of his music @ www.jeremyjonesmusic.com.
The whole thing was captured and edited in Vista with RC1 and Movie Maker! I only ran into one crashing bug and it's been fixed since RC1.
There was exactly 1 4x8 sheet left over as calculated!

Latest Video from Developer Solutions on "Going Open"

jledgard — Tue, 12 Sep 2006 20:23:58 GMT

Sara recently attended OSCON and wanted to give our team a recap of what she learned there. We figured it would be good education for softies and non-softies if we filmed it and published the video to the Internet. Check out her presentation on Port 25!

Demo night to motivate teams?

jledgard — Fri, 08 Sep 2006 09:18:40 GMT

During our team's sprints we've started striving for "Demo Fridays" where our Friday scrum meeting is extended for team members to show off new functionality/prototypes they've implemented during the week. Recently they started this for the division to show off new stuff all across the Orcas wave. I've personally come to really like the idea. It's a great way for teams (big and small) to learn about and give feedback on stuff they aren't working directly on. What do you all think about regular "Demo Days"?

Help us find VSCmdShell Bugs

jledgard — Wed, 16 Aug 2006 20:56:39 GMT

Our team is going to release a 1.1 update of the VSCmdShell tool window for Visual Studio and we are spending the day looking for bugs. Because the project is public you can participate as well. Head on over to the codeplex site

http://www.codeplex.com/WorkItem/List.aspx?ProjectName=VSCmdShell

sign in, and file some bugs. You can see all the existing bugs we're filing as well. We'll be starting the bug fixing next week and targeting a 1.1 release by mid-September that will hopefully remove any adoption blockers.

Background...

Developer Solutions Sprint 6: BPA Tool, 1.1 Releases, & The Developer Power Pack

jledgard — Tue, 08 Aug 2006 23:44:51 GMT

Today the Developer Solutions team has begun its 6^th five week sprint. Sprint 5 saw the release of the VSCmdShell tool & an Alpha of our Best Practices Analyzer for ASP.Net 2.0. There was buy-off to begin working with CSS on a detailed plan for a CSS involvement in released product communities.

We also prototyped a project that I’m excited about called the “Pack Installer” that has the potential to create a vehicle/channel for any team looking to ship aftermarket developer solutions to their customers.

In the next 5 weeks we plan to:

Ship a 1.0 release of the Best Practices Analyzer Engine w/ ASP.Net 2.0 Plug-In
Publish 1.1 Releases: VSCmdShell & TFS Admin Tool
Prototype a Power Toy Starter Kit, Online snippet publishing, Nunit Test Generator, & a developer forum Moderator Toolbar Services
Draft of Detailed CSS Online Community Presentation for September
Host a brownbag on developer division involvement in Shared Source & Power Toys aimed at making it easier for every team to get involved.
Create a public alpha of the “Developer Power Pack”

For other teams at Microsoft

By the end of this sprint we’ll be able to give you great guidance around Shared Source Projects, a solid delivery vehicle that does one step better for customers than just throwing random stuff on MS Download, and guidance on building aftermarket solutions/Power Toys that are consistent for our customers.

Thanks,
Josh

Detailed Sprint 5 Recap

Releases

VSCmdShell 1.0: http://www.codeplex.com/Wiki/View.aspx?ProjectName=VSCmdShell
Best Practices Analyzer for ASP.Net 2.0 configurations Alpha 1: http://blogs.msdn.com/joemorel/archive/2006/06/29/651082.aspx

Shared Source Leadership

Partnering with LCA to create a generic license for Power Toys
Power Toy Landing Page
Our most famous blogger speaking at BlogHer
Represented Microsoft at OSCON

Share and Collaborate Scenario

Snippet Editor that integrates with the VS IDE written and polished
Content Explorer for snippets, add-ins, templates, etc. prototyped

Power Toy Pack Installer

Pack installer prototyped that will allow customers to download groups of our tools and automatically install them
Pack installer specification drafted:

Best Practices Analyzer Tool

Test Plan Completed
Over 3,700 downloads of the alpha
Added updating mechanism

Answerme Search Page Completed: http://answerme/search.aspx

(This is our internal forum question assignment & search tool)

Other Prototypes

Resource refactoring tool that converts literals to resource files in Visual Studio
Forums MSN Search tool that constructs complex search queries against the metadata on forum questions: http://www.gotdotnet.com/codegallery/codegallery.aspx?id=eb5f1dc5-6868-4fde-9c78-909832315ccc

Support Channels

CSS Online Community Engagement Proposal to Execs w/ buyoff to continue project
MSDN Forums Over 4,000 questions a week/DevDiv over 70% overall answer rate

Throw Away Your 5 Year Plans

jledgard — Mon, 31 Jul 2006 23:14:56 GMT

I don't want any part of them. They result in over-engineering, wasted documentation, never-ending discussion as everyone takes the opportunity to put their chef hat on, employees that get stuck going down a path while the world changes around them, and promises to customers you won't be able to keep.

Planning is not bad and having a clear vision a necessity, but don't get caught up in the details of your roadmaps. Instead of a huge roadmap have a customer scenario end-state that you can use to comunicate what needs to be enabled, made simpler, or exposes an opportunity.

Another way to think about it is that your goal should not be to pretend you are a writer on Alias that keeps trying to build up to a dramatic "end game" that takes five years and will likely disappoint. Make sure everyone knows about your end game and try to keep it achievable in 2-3 years or less.

The more you accomplish down a path quickly the more people will learn about and have your "end game" come into focus for them with a bunch of "aha" moments as the see the pieces fall into place. If you can't communicate your desired end state and a roadmap for getting there in less then one slide... I don't want to be a part of it. There's just so much low hanging fruit out there that your time will be better spent picking them off to get short term wins that start to make your desired end state more visible to folks.

What you need is smart people to identify the low hanging fruit, prioritize the fruit in order of how much closer each piece gets you to your desired end sate, and start picking them off one at a time.

Another problem with the "5 year" thinking that's rampant here at Microsoft is when people say "Yeah, that would be cool, but what we should be thinking about is..." and the ... is usually filled in with the most overengineered solution you can think of that's designed to handle every edge case and adjacent problem you could imagine.

We're hired and paid to constantly be thinking in line with big pictures that we frequently miss the little things that, when done en-mass, would have a much bigger effect on customer satisfaction than the overengineered solution would.. because you'd be 5 years late.

Again, I don't have a problem with big solutions to big issues, but at Microsoft we often grab that big hammer too frequently when what you had was a pushpin of a scenario.

I guess, in the end, what I'd suggest is to question your choice of weapons used to solve problems. Only break out hammers when necessary, don't believe that every problem needs a 5 year plan, and start accomplishing the little things that will have a huge customer impact... just make sure that you do have an "end game" in mind that your building towards. And remember that an "end game" shouldn't take you 5 years.

Next Prototype Tool: Resource Refactoring

jledgard — Fri, 28 Jul 2006 21:28:35 GMT

Bertan recently blogged about his next project. Feel free to leave him feedback. I saw the demo and it's a slick feature. Unfortunately not much dev work is going to get done in the meantime... he's out for four weeks on vacation to get married and enjoy a honeymoon... and when he gets back his office may not be in working order... I'm taking suggestions for that project as well. :-)

Now that VSCmdShell is released, I started working on a Refactoring power toy to help with converting strings in to resource files as it has to be performed manually now. It is primary feature will be to place selected string in to a resource file and replace it with the code to get that string from the resource file.

Source: Bertan's Blog : Resource Refactoring tool

Know & love your big picture

jledgard — Thu, 27 Jul 2006 01:00:00 GMT

This is a question that just about every PM at Microsoft has to answer frequently.

"What's your big picture?" or "How does this fit into the big picture?"

Our culture is one of visualization and we love our grand views. (Hidden pun most certainly intended... sometimes we love our big pictures a bit too much, but that's another blog entry). I suggest that you not only get used to answering this question if you work here, but that you also make sure everyone you know and everyone that you don't know understands your mental image. Because you never know where you're going to get that unexpected resource or vote of support. And when people know what your picture is they'll be on the lookout for your missing puzzle pieces.

"So your team writes these little toys (Developer Power Toys)?" Is a question/statement I get frequently. If that's all I can write on my review at the end of next year then I'll have failed. Our team writing these tools is only the first part of a vista that hasn't been painted yet. So let me paint a bigger picture for you that's task based.

"My team wrote this cool tool we'd love to ship to customers before Orcas+1 ships... what next"

Guess who has experience here? We do. We can help your team:

Deliver a consistent user experience for customers using MSFT produced developer tools. This tool is integrated into the IDE, that one doesn't have an installer, I now have 4 different start menu folders added, why does this tool run in the system tray... these are all issues that can't be solves without a central team responsible for making sure there is some consistency across our aftermarket releases designed to drive up the overall quality.
Share the source code & create a top notch collaborative environment with customers that could lead to an even better tool. It may seem trivial to customers, but today "I'm going to post this code to customers" is not a trivial step to take at Microsoft. Our team is working with LCA to simplify this for folks & also come up with best practices for creating a healthy code community.
Meet & Exceed the MSFT required validations
Connect with other teams that are also looking into similar problems. I'm less shocked daily when I find out about the duplication of effort going on.
And potentially assist with our ideas, feedback, and development/test/pm resources.

"How do we get customers to find our tool?"

If your release plan concludes with "Publish the installer to the MS Download center & write a blog post about the tool" then you're probably missing out. Your download numbers are going to be poor & your tool is going to collect dust on the download center & it isn't going to have the impact you were hoping for.

This is a huge problem at Microsoft today. It's part of the reason we have such serious feature creep into our core products. There's a belief, that's been proven valid, that if it's not in the box then customers won't benefit from it. I know this is a problem because I hear about 2-3 useful tools a month that are simply tossed over the wall to customers... never to be heard from again... effort wasted.

What our team is going to do is give you a ship vehicle or "channel" if you will for your Power Toy/Developer Solution. It's an acknowledgement that our team can't possibly understand the need of every developer & doesn't have the resources to ship every develop resource we should ship as a company. What does this channel consist of?

The first part of that channel is a consistent URL for customers to get information about MSFT produced tools & the program in general. http://msdn.microsoft.com/powertoys
Second, as Jeremy Describes, we're working on a Power Toy Pack installer. This installer will not only let developers install all of our tools in one step, but any MSFT developer related tool. This means that developers will only have to find one tool to learn about all the others we produce as a company.
This installer could eventually be rolled into the primary Visual Studio install as a "final step" that lets users choose their add-ons after the main product install has completed or accessible via a "Get More Dev Tools" button... thus partially solving the "but if it's not in the box problem.
Finally, there are some awesome customer produced free tools out there... why shouldn't they be included... why don't we highlight their stuff? We will.

Keep in mind this is only the stuff our team is working on designed to help other teams be more successful with aftermarket solutions. This is only a corner of the team's charter. Let me quickly paint some of the other corners.

What about making it easier for customers to create and share Visual Studio content? Needless to say we've got some cool stuff up our sleeves around making it easier for you to share code snippets, samples, add-ons, etc over the Internet... or dump truck if you will.
What about our support communities? Product support is no longer a simple matter of manning a phone que waiting for customers to call. If a customer has to call... I believe we've failed. How are you making sure you've got a healthy online support community? How can questions from this community be escalated to official support? How can a customer get an "instant answer"? These are all questions and whole other blog posts we are working on solving to make customers feel (and actually be) more supported.
Oh yeah, we ship some little toys as well... every 6 weeks.

We're all here to make customers more successful with the product their using today and I love this problem space.