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Welcome to Popfly

Posted Friday, May 18, 2007 8:47 AM by johnmont
Today (that'd be Friday) we're announcing Microsoft Popfly(tm) , which is the project my team has been working on. It's a simple, web-based tool that makes it easy to create mashups, web pages, and so on. We also have a Visual Studio 2005 package that Read More...
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RTB Finished

Posted Wednesday, December 13, 2006 10:09 PM by johnmont
One of the meetings that our division inflicts regularly schedules is called "running the business" (formerly they were called "rhythm of the business" but I think someone noticed that we don't got rhythm). Our team had its RTB meeting today. It went Read More...
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US Imagine Cup: Not Just Algorithms

Posted Thursday, October 19, 2006 9:42 AM by johnmont
One of the largest challenges facing CS students is the transition from being a CS student to writing production code in a work environment for a living. Historically programming challenges have focused more on CS-student-oriented work, but this year Read More...
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Job Descriptions

Posted Friday, June 30, 2006 8:03 AM by johnmont
I’ve found that writing job descriptions is harder than I thought. In particular, it’s harder because I’m writing for so many audiences: for the internal developers and PMs who might be interested, the external folks, for other managers, and so on. Here’s Read More...
3 Comments

NPT Team Charter

Posted Thursday, June 29, 2006 8:31 AM by johnmont
After about four months of working through some hard problems, I’ve begun to center our team on a few core work areas. Based a lot on the feedback you gave me through this blog, I narrowed it to three work areas: We’re going to start by building on the Read More...
2 Comments

Non-Pro Tools Team PUM

Posted Wednesday, June 28, 2006 7:03 AM by johnmont
We have a PUM. Paramesh Vaidyanathan who ran the India Developer Center for Developer Division – a team of something like 100 people – has decided he wants to come back to the US to run the Non-Professional Tools Team (NPT – our team). I’m incredibly Read More...
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What We’re Doing: Cool Tools

Posted Tuesday, June 27, 2006 1:32 PM by johnmont
While I’ve been running around creating PPTs and sending email, Adam has been working on a prototype development experience that’s designed to take someone with no knowledge of code through to creating simple Web sites with HTML and Javascript or VBscript, Read More...
2 Comments

Adam Nathan Joins Non-Pro Tools Team

Posted Tuesday, June 27, 2006 7:59 AM by johnmont
We have our first developer. Adam Nathan has joined us. If that name sounds familiar, it’s because he’s the soul behind Pinvoke.net , a community site dedicated to getting good coverage of .NET’s Pinvoke functionality (which he largely wrote). I knew Read More...
3 Comments

We Have a Name: NPT

Posted Monday, June 26, 2006 6:36 AM by johnmont
We still need a name for the team. Since none of the ideas we came up with previously seemed to pass the internal sniff test (go figure), I decided that I’d opt for naming it descriptively: the Non-Professional Tools Team, or NPT for short. We’re still Read More...
4 Comments

After HTML and Javascript, C++

Posted Thursday, May 25, 2006 2:58 PM by johnmont
Surprising factoid: after HTML and Javascript, C++ is the language most used by non-professional developers (including students, hobbyists, etc.). This based on some of our internal research over the past 4 years (statistically significant sample, but Read More...
12 Comments

An Express Web Page Editor?

Posted Wednesday, May 10, 2006 8:03 AM by johnmont
Do we need a complement to Visual Web Developer Express (i.e. a free, simplified Web page editor) that is aimed at the HTML jockey? If so, what features should it have? The big question for me on this one is where a sitebuilder (the Web-based configuration Read More...
3 Comments

Multitargeting and Express

Posted Tuesday, May 09, 2006 7:57 AM by johnmont
When Visual Studio "Orcas" ships, we have a question we need to answer: which version(s) of the .NET Framework/WinFX should it target? Having a single tool that can target various runtimes has been something I've been a strong advocate of for years, but Read More...
10 Comments

Express "Orcas" Principles

Posted Monday, May 08, 2006 7:48 AM by johnmont
Building on my Principles for First-Use Tools , I'm thinking about Principles for Express. Express is a tougher job because its customer base spans so many people -- from professionals coding after hours to students to people who aren't developers using Read More...
15 Comments

How Did You Learn to Program?

Posted Wednesday, May 03, 2006 7:01 AM by johnmont
How did you learn to program? Especially if you’re not a professional developer and never had been (I already have the data that says that something like 70% of professional developers got degrees in computer science or engineering). I’m wondering how Read More...
19 Comments

Who's the Customer?

Posted Tuesday, May 02, 2006 7:50 AM by johnmont
Who is the target user for our non-professional tools? In order to make smarter decisions about what we build, we need to understand that the customer we’re building this product for doesn’t fit a single profile. Off the top of my head, I can think of Read More...
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