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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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Power Outage

Posted Wednesday, December 13, 2006 1:40 PM by johnmont
This morning, building 41 lost power. Steven Wilssens (one of the PMs on my team) and I were just settling into some deep conversation when everything went black and the fire alarm started whooping and periodically saying, "Lobby, lobby, lobby" in an Read More...
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Calculating Operational Costs

Posted Monday, November 13, 2006 9:24 AM by johnmont
One of my tasks over the weekend was to calculate how much it would cost to operate a service. I can't tell you what the service is, of course, since actually providing useful context is far beyond the scope of this blog. ;-) However, I had a good sit-down Read More...
2 Comments

Doing the Happy Dance

Posted Thursday, August 24, 2006 8:59 AM by johnmont
After a review with SomaSe last week in which we demoed what I'll just call "our stuff" (though the credit belongs to Adam Nathan , who really needs to update his blog), we went yesterday to present to Bob Muglia. The last time I presented to Bob in any Read More...
6 Comments

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

Dumb Idea Nipped in the Bud: Film at 11

Posted Tuesday, May 23, 2006 6:04 AM by johnmont
Have you ever sat down and thought up some brilliant thing, then realized, “Why bother?” Today during an interview, a candidate related a question he was asked about how he’d implement a particular feature. To me, the feature (it’s not important what Read More...
2 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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