Kathy Kam : Off-Topic Posts

PDC '07... save the date!

KathyKam — Thu, 14 Dec 2006 04:41:00 GMT

Microsoft will be holding the next Professional Developers Conference (PDC) October 2-5, 2007 in Los Angeles, with two days of pre-conference on September 30 and October 1. Save the date!

Check out http://msdn.microsoft.com/events/pdc

I am hoping to go and unveil this new project I am working on. :)

Haven't posted in a while

KathyKam — Tue, 28 Nov 2006 09:39:00 GMT

Sorry I haven't posted in a while. It has mainly been two reasons.The site hosting MSDN blogs was down alot during mid-Oct to late Oct. I was sick of my post getting "lost". Secondly, I've been pretty busy with a new project that haven't been annouced yet and I can't really blog about it.

Anyways, with the holidays approaching in the US, things have been pretty quiet.

Here is to a belated "Happy Thanksgiving" and a early "Happy Holidays". :)

WinForms learning...

KathyKam — Wed, 18 Oct 2006 03:27:00 GMT

So a few posts ago, I said I'll teach myself WinForms. It's been about a month since then... and I want to share some of my learning experience.

First off, having been a developer in Outlook, I thought I'll re-write the Outlook client using WinForms. Kind of like what Joe Stegmann did here. Here are the issues I ran into...

1) I can't find "MessageBox"!
I am actually a little embrassed to even admit what was the first issues I ran into. So, as in any application, I thought I'll start with a simple "Hello World" message box. I wasn't reading tutorials or anything to start. I just started with the Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 and selected a new Windows Forms application. I searched for "Error Dialog Windows Forms", "Warning Dialog .NET" and so forth on MSDN, Live Search, Google.. you name it. NONE of them turned up "MessageBox"! After half an hour of fun times with the search engines, I decided to write my own.

2) Layout
In Outlook, we did a lot of own layout code. Again, I spend my fair share of time on the search engine only to find nothing useful. So again, I wrote my own. Only to find.. Windows Forms has their own layout! You can do this using the "Docking" functionality.

3) Two-way DataBinding a TreeView
Ok.. so the search engines burned me twice, and I thought, not finding a 2-way databind TreeView was my own poor skills in using a search engine. Yes... 1 hours later, I learnt... Windows Forms really doesn't have one, and I should have spent my time writing one.

I found the Windows Forms FAQ very useful during my learnng process...

What were the stuff you ran into when you first learnt Windows Forms? Do you have any good resources to share?

<Editorial Note>
I have been playing around with WPF a lot lately... hopefully I will share my experience and some cool samples
</Editorial Note>

Teach myself WinForms and WPF...

KathyKam — Thu, 28 Sep 2006 03:58:00 GMT

In the next two weeks, I will be spending some time to learn WinForms and WPF to expand my .NET knowledge. :) I was a UI dev in Outlook,, so I understand the basic concepts of GDI and Win32 programming. But I haven't used WinForms much at all. WinForms is based on Win32! So this will be interesting. Seeing different parts of .NET for the first time always gives you new perspective.

Before I begin, do you have any advice? What was the most difficult thing for you when you learn WinForms or WPF?

I plan on blogging my experience regularly, and share my insights to everyone!

I'm going on vacation for 2 weeks, and so is my blog!

KathyKam — Fri, 28 Jul 2006 18:00:00 GMT

I am so excited about my vacation on August 1st to August 17th. Since I will be on some beach in Thailand, it'll be unlikely that I'll be blogging or answering emails. I didn't annouce my vacation plans in June when I left and received some emails on why I haven't posted in a while. So this time, I am letting you all know well ahead of time! :)

However, before I go, on Monday July 31st, I'll probably be at Lang.Net Symposium with a bunch of BCL folks. If you guys are planning to go there, and have specific BCL questions, please let me know. I will try my best to answer them at the conference.

On Tuesday and Wednesday, they will continue to have the open Q&A session, but unfortunately since I will be stuck on a 14 hour plane trip to South East Asia, I probably wont be able to make it. :P

Want to work on the BCL?

KathyKam — Mon, 15 May 2006 18:51:00 GMT

Since Whidbey shipped, our team has been trying to fill some open headcounts in all disciplines. The open headcounts are to replace people whom have moved on to other things and to help with our expanded charter.

We have open headcounts in UE, Test and Dev.

Personally, I find the BCL to be a great team to work on. The team is passionate about what we do. The work we do has a high impact. (Everyone who writes managed code uses the BCL APIs.)

Come join us.. and make a difference in managed code!

Lakshan Fernando, our test lead, talks about his open positions here.

I wrote a short post about the CLR User Education (aka Documenation) team here.

I think Anthony, our dev lead, will post his open positions on the dev team on the BCL Team Weblog sometime next week.

This is a chance of a lifetime... don't miss it.

Meet the BCL Team

KathyKam — Thu, 11 May 2006 00:53:00 GMT

Have you ever wonder who are the people behind the BCL?

MSDN has this "Meet the BCL Team" page. The page have not been maintaned and was left outdated for a while (it contained many people who has come and left the team since V1). Yesterday, the MSDN content team updated the page.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/netframework/aa569604.aspx

I think my picture looks terrible.. but oh well.. mug shots are never meant to compliment you.

New-ish CLR/Reflection Blogger

KathyKam — Fri, 28 Apr 2006 06:17:00 GMT

I mentioned a while back that I change from being a PM for System.Reflection and System.Reflection.Emit..e.t.c to joining the BCL team. (Therefore instead of working of those feature... I'll be owning System.*...etc.) Well.. who's gonna own those features then?

Please meet Thottam Sriram! Thottam is THE new Reflection/Reflection.Emit/CodeDOM PM on our team. For those of you interested in Reflection ..e.t.c, he has some very interesting post about "overiding a property using new and reflection" and "the difference between .cctors and ctors" just to name a few.

I should get him to post an article for the BCL Blog. :)