Ken Levy's Blog : Windows Live

From product planner to program manager

klevy — Sat, 14 Apr 2007 03:51:00 GMT

This week I took on a newly created position at Microsoft, as community program manager on the Visual Studio Ecosystem team focusing on developer community for VSX (Visual Studio Extensibility). The VSX community includes developers who build add-ins (tools, editors, designers, languages, and more) for Visual Studio using the VS SDK found at the VSX developer center at http://msdn.com/vsx.

It was not an easy decision for me to leave the Windows Live Platform division where there are many great people I worked with and many cool things going on there. Many of those cool new things from the Windows Live Platform group will be announced at the MIX07 event in a few weeks. Most of the what I was working on in Windows Live around product planning over the last 6+ months has been under non-disclosure, and I haven't been blogging in a while. In the next few weeks, I will be doing some activities for Channel 9 content and http://dev.live.com/ blogging leading up to and during the MIX07 conference. In my transition back to the developer division, I'll be bringing knowledge and enthusiasm about Windows Live to the Visual Studio division which may contribute in various future efforts for Visual Studio based SDKs and add-ins for developers who are using Windows Live Platform services.

For those who don't know my past, here is my bio:

Ken Levy is the community program manager on the Visual Studio Ecosystem team focusing on developer community for VSX (Visual Studio Extensibility). The VSX community includes developers who build add-ins (tools, editors, designers, languages, and more) for Visual Studio using the VS SDK found at the VSX developer center http://msdn.com/vsx. Ken was previously a product planner on Microsoft's Windows Live Platform team working on developer community and future product planning. Before working in the Windows Live division, Ken was a product manager in the VS Data team responsible Visual FoxPro product management, the VFP developer web site, as well as sponsorship of the new XML tools in Visual Studio 2005 created by the WebData XML team. Ken is a long time recognized member of the FoxPro community and has developed many high profile applications and tools in all versions of FoxBase/FoxPro since 1986. Ken spent over four years as a software engineer consulting for Microsoft on the Visual FoxPro team from version 3.0 through 7.0 and is the author of many components of Visual FoxPro including the Class Browser and Component Gallery. While working as a consultant at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in the 1990s, Ken developed many public domain open source programs including GenScrnX and other developer tools used worldwide in creating in-house and commercial applications. Ken is a former technical contributing writer and editor to many software magazines, and has been a frequent speaker at industry conferences world wide since 1992. Ken's blog is at http://blogs.msdn.com/klevy.

Some additional information about my career background is contained in a detailed blog post I made last year: Enduring adventures to Antarctica and Microsoft.

In the spirit of transparency, below is the exact job description of the newly created position I just started on yesterday which should give some insight the various new VSX community efforts that I will be focused on:

Visual Studio is the world’s leading development environment, and our large partner ecosystem helped us attain that position. Hundreds of companies extend Visual Studio with features such as new development languages, application lifecycle tools, IDE enhancements, reusable components and much more. These partner offerings help to fill the gaps in the Microsoft product line and deliver tailored end-to-end solutions to customers that we wouldn’t reach otherwise. The Visual Studio Ecosystem team is chartered with growing and strengthening this developer tools ecosystem. We ship the Visual Studio SDK, help ISVs integrate their products with Microsoft tools, and engage with the enthusiast community extending Visual Studio. We received the Developer Division’s Lighthouse award for team innovation and execution excellence in using agile development methodology, shipping frequent SDK releases, and engaging our partners for mutual success.

We are looking for a strong program manager to lead our initiatives growing the number of enthusiast developers creating Visual Studio extensions. You will work with our product and marketing teams to build a developer community from the ground up. You will coordinate and execute an overall strategy encompassing community infrastructure, team engagement, content, and product features. You yourself may also become a major presence and central figure in the community through blogs, forums, and conferences. This position leads a key pillar of our ecosystem strategy, and will receive a lot of visibility both internally and externally to Microsoft.

The ideal candidate will have prior success in growing some type of community (preferably developer-related) and the ability to manage many concurrent projects. This position offers a unique opportunity to exercise your leadership, project management, and strategic planning skills. Responsibilities include but are not limited to:
· Own the plan to establish a new, self-sustaining developer community
· Drive the product team’s community engagement
· Personally maintain a major presence in the community
· Speak at conferences and other community events
· Establish the online community infrastructure
· Launch a new MVP discipline
· Coordinate special development projects
· Find new ways to grow and enrich the community

I'm on James Lau's team, his blog is at http://blogs.msdn.com/jameslau/. I'll be blogging here weekly and working on other types of online content starting next week. I'm part of a team working on making overall enhancements to the VSX developer center at http://msdn.com/vsx. Starting in May, I plan to post a monthly letter there to the VSX community with information about what's new with the VS SDK, community news, upcoming events, and what's coming soon from the VS Ecosystem team. If you are a VSX developer (developer who has used the VS SDK), feel free to contact me and let me know your ideas and suggestions around improving the VS SDK and helping build an enthusiastic, passionate, and successful developer community around Visual Studio extensibility.

Spring of Windows Live sites, services, and products

klevy — Sat, 14 Apr 2007 03:27:00 GMT

feedback.live.com has an updated list of Windows Live services for feedback (31 listed as of today, with some beta sites removed previously listed):

Feedback Services

Live Maps

Live QnA

Live Search

Live.com

Windows Live Account

Windows Live Alerts

Windows Live Call

Windows Live Call for Free

Windows Live Custom Domains

Windows Live Dev

Windows Live Expo

Windows Live Favorites

Windows Live Gallery

Windows Live Hotmail

Windows Live ID

Windows Live Ideas

Windows Live Mail desktop

Windows Live Mail for mobile

Windows Live Messenger

Windows Live Messenger for mobile

Windows Live Mobile

Windows Live OneCare

Windows Live OneCare Family Safety

Windows Live OneCare Safety Scanner

Windows Live Product Upload

Windows Live Publishing Portal

Windows Live Shopping

Windows Live Spaces

Windows Live Toolbar and Desktop Search

Windows Live Web Search

Windows Live Writer

Summer of Windows Live sites, services, and products

klevy — Tue, 01 Aug 2006 09:32:00 GMT

There are some cool new Windows Live web sites and services rolling out lately, including my favorite new one gallery.live.com. The new Windows Live Gallery is a great resources for users of Windows Live services, and also has a story for developers contribute to Windows Live Gallery, for developers and business who want to submit their own Windows Live components such as live.com gadgets, Windows Live Toolbar Custom Buttons, Windows Live Messenger Bots and Activities, Windows Live Search Macros, Windows Vista Sidebar Gadgets, and Windows Desktop Search Applications & iFilters.

Another cool new Windows Live site, here a product download, is the Windows Live Toolbar at toolbar.live.com. Windows Live Domains released at domains.live.com. There are other new Windows Live relates sites to check out, like get.live.com, experience.live.com, inside.live.com, account.live.com (requires Windows Live ID sign-in). Many product and services including betas are available at ideas.live.com.

feedback.live.com has a growing list of Windows Live services for feedback (41 listed as of today):

Feedback Services

Windows Live Academic Search
Windows Live Book Search
Windows Live Call
Windows Live Call for Free
Windows Live Custom Domains
Windows Live Dev
Windows Live Expo
Windows Live Favorites
Windows Live Feeds
Windows Live Gallery
Windows Live ID
Windows Live Ideas
Windows Live Image Search
Windows Live Local
Windows Live Mail
Windows Live Mail Desktop
Windows Live Messenger
Windows Live Mobile
Windows Live Mobile Mail
Windows Live Mobile Search
Windows Live Near Me Search
Windows Live News Search
Windows Live Newsbot
Windows Live OneCare
Windows Live Product Search
Windows Live Publishing Portal
Windows Live QnA
Windows Live Safety Center
Windows Live Search
Windows Live Search Answers
Windows Live Search Center
Windows Live Search Help
Windows Live Search Macros
Windows Live Search Translation
Windows Live Shopping
Windows Live Spaces
Windows Live Toolbar and Desktop Search
Windows Live Web Search
Windows Live Web Search SDK
Windows Live Wifi Suite
Windows Live.com

Creating mashups using the Virtual Earth Interactive SDK

klevy — Fri, 09 Jun 2006 22:57:00 GMT

One of the cool things we are doing with the Windows Live Dev site at dev.live.com is hosting mashups on the site itself for samples, documentation, etc. The Virtual Earth team recently released a new Virtual Earth Interactive SDK mashup at dev.live.com/virtualearth/sdk recently announced on the the Virtual Earth developer blog. The Virtual Earth team provided me with a cool demo script to show at TechEd next week that highlights some of the cool features of the new VE Interactive SDK. Here is a fun simple demo script that you can try out to create a Virtual Earth mashup web page component:

Go to dev.live.com/virtualearth/sdk.
Open the page, and say something like “what do I want to do? Let’s draw a polygon on the map”.
Expand Draw lines, and then click on Draw a polygon.
The map changes and shows a polygon.
“OK, so that’s what I want to do, so let’s get the code to do it” .
Switch to the Source Code tab and click the Copy button.
1. Note: if you select the code and copy it manually, it preserves the whitespace and looks better when you paste it into Notepad. If you choose the Copy button, it is faster, but doesn’t look as good when you paste it into Notepad. If you paste into a new HTML file in Visual Studio, you get all the nice formatting, so that might be the best way to go.
Open Notepad (or a new HTML in Visual Studio) and paste in the code you just copied.
Save the file to the desktop as test.html.
Minimize everything, and double-click test.html.
When the page loads, click the security bar and choose Allow Blocked Content. Depending on the audience, maybe explain that the security only pops up when running locally.
1. Alternately, if you are running IIS, save the file in a Web directory and then open it from the browser—no security message.
Click on the Draw a Polygon button to see that it does what you expected—draws a polygon on the map.

Some comments about the Virtual Earth Interactive SDK:

You don’t need to be a professional developer to add maps to your web pages. The interactive SDK makes it very simple to get started.
For active web developers, the interactive SDK still provides the full reference SDK on its own tab.
The interactive SDK is a mashup that shows you how to build a mashup—it’s a self-describing “meta” SDK.

Windows Live Dev launched in beta mode at dev.live.com

klevy — Fri, 09 Jun 2006 21:57:00 GMT

The Windows Live Dev site has launched today in beta mode at http://dev.live.com. The Windows Live Dev site will be an dynamic and evolving web site as both a home for developers building on the Windows Live Platform as well as hosting mashups that uses technologies and services we provide. We will still have the Windows Live Developer Center at http://msdn.com/live as a landing page from the http://msdn.com site. The msdn.com/live dev center will be updated later today to update various links to the new content at dev.live, and there will be a fair amount of cross-linking between the two sites going forward. I'll post a blog entry in the near future going into more details about how dev.live is a mashup itself using msdn.com content and more, and how msdn.com/live will relate to dev.live going forward. There is a Feedback link on the dev.live home page. The devlive team will be reading all feedback we receive as we want to developers to contribute to the ideas and suggestions for this evolving Windows Live Dev site.

My first LiveSide.net podcast interview

klevy — Wed, 17 May 2006 14:53:00 GMT

I was recently inteviewed in a LiveSide.net podcast by Chris Overd and Harrison Hoffman when they were visiting the Microsoft main campus in Redmond along with others from the LiveSide.net team. Refer to Interview with Ken Levy, Product Planner for the Windows Live Platform.

Last week we sat down with Ken Levy, Product Planner for the Windows Live Platform to talk about how Microsoft intends to support 3rd party developers across Windows Live. In this interview Ken talks about why Messenger Add-Ins will not be in the options menu by default and how he wants as much feedback as possible from you the developers, especially regarding what scenarios you want to achieve and what API's you would like to see exposed in order to do this.

0.00 Introduction
0.59 Messenger Add-Ins
6.28 Windows Live Developer Community
7.10 Bots and Activities
10.46 Business Opportunities
12.14 Windows Live Developer platform as a whole
14.05 Ken's Mix 06 Demoes
16.23 Gadgets
17.45 Ken questions us about what we want to see
20.00 End

Filesize: 9.12MB

Talking about the Windows Live Platform at VSLive in Orlando

klevy — Wed, 17 May 2006 14:32:00 GMT

I'm currently in Orlando, Florida speaking later this morning at the VSLive conference on the Windows Live Platform for developers in back to back sessions titled Modern Web Development from Mashups to IM-Based Bots. The updated abstract for the dual session is below:

This session will go into details with demos on what the Windows Live Platform platform is and how it relates to developers. Details will also include how to developers and business can monetize using the various Windows Live services as well as add value to existing web, desktop, and device applications. There will be many demos showing how various Windows Live API services can be used together to create useful mashups. The demos will include API services and developer SDKs using services such as Messenger, Search, Virtual Earth (VE), Windows Live Local, as well as previews to possible future APIs such as Contacts, Calendar, and Mail. The Virtual Earth development part of this presentation includes includes SOAP and JavaScript APIs providing render, map navigation, geo-coding, proximity searching and routing features. The VE code demos will demonstrate how to get started with adding maps and GIS features to your applications including best practices and solution tips. Attendees will gain a solid understanding of the Virtual Earth platform with the skills and samples to get quickly get started. There will also be details included for our new developer-centric Windows Live Platform web site and a preview into what new services and developer offerings are coming in the future for the platform. The first half of this dual session will focus on Search APIs, Search Macros and Virtual Earth. The second half will include demos of the APIs for Messenger, Gadgets for live.com, and mashups using Windows Live services.

Some related team blogs with additional information on these topics include MSN Search Team Blog, Virtual Earth Developer Blog, Windows Live ID Team Blog, Windows Live Messenger Team Blog.

Refer to Katie Blanch's Blog for developers creating .NET based Add-ins to the Windows Live Messenger client. Katie just started her new blog, see her recent detailed post All About Messenger Add-ins. Katie is also here in Orlando at VSLive and will be involved in the demos for Messenger Add-ins in the dual Windows Live Platform session here.

Check out Via Virtual Earth created and hosted by Dr. Neil Roodyn and friends/partners, be sure to review their Gallery of Virtual Earth mashups.

WebCast: MSN Search APIs: Building Web Search into Your Applications - Find out how to harness the power of Web Search in your applications. This webcast provides an overview of the MSN Web Search application programming interfaces (APIs). We also demonstrate how to use these APIs to create applications that help users search for information on the Web.

Refer to http://msdn.com/live for additional information and downloads on these topics.

How Windows Live relates to MSN

klevy — Thu, 11 May 2006 01:50:00 GMT

Recently, Mary Jo Foley of Microsoft-Watch.com interviewed Blake Irving, Microsoft Vice President, Windows Live Platform Group. The transcript is at Windows Live: The 50,000-Foot View and contains the excerpt below:

Microsoft Watch (MSW): When I define Windows Live (in ten words or less), I call it Microsoft's services extensions to Windows. Do you have a better shorthand way to refer to Live? Is Live really more than MSN services rebranded – another definition some have applied to it?

Irving: When I explain Windows Live, I describe a service that seamlessly brings Web experiences together with Windows software and provides greater relevance in people's lives. Saying that Windows Live is simply extensions to Windows is too Windows-centric, and saying that it is MSN services rebranded also sells Windows Live short.

Windows Live Messenger Add-ins beta feature for developers

klevy — Thu, 11 May 2006 01:17:00 GMT

Windows Live Messenger beta is now available for anyone to download and install, a public beta rather than a private beta. In our continued effort to empower developers interested creating components for customizing Windows Live Messenger 8.0 via the extensibility model, we have set up functionality in Windows Live Messenger try out and test the new Add-ins feature. Add-ins are API hooks to customize, extend, and build upon the Windows Live Messenger client application. We plan to release this Add-in SDK as a download for msdn.com in early June, so beta feedback on the Add-ins SDK need to be sent to us by the end of May.

Messenger Add-ins are disabled by default and are for developers. With Windows Live Messenger 8.0, the Add-in feature in the Options dialog is disabled by default. Add-ins can be enabled using a Windows Registry setting and exist for developers and do not target consumer usage at this time. So you will not see Add-ins mentioned as a primary new feature in Windows Live Messenger version 8.0 and instead it is a feature for developers in beta test mode only. In a future release of Windows Live Messenger beyond version 8.0, we may release a new version of the Windows Live Messenger that will include the Add-ins feature enabled in the Options dialog by default for all users. We ask that you work on creating your Add-ins and report back to us any feedback on how we can improve the SDK and extensibility feature set in the future.

To enable the Windows Live Messenger Add-ins tab in the Tools...Options dialog, create a .reg file using Notepad or other called something like WLMessengerAddins.reg containing the following text, and then execute/start the file to update the Windows Registry.

REGEDIT4

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\MSNMessenger]

"AddInFeatureEnabled"=dword:00000001

Information and free download links can be found at http://ideas.live.com. The MessengerSays blog has up to date information and tips about Windows Live Messenger. Next month we will make a .NET based Windows Live Messenger Add-ins SDK beta (for Visual Studio 2005 developers) available for download, and we will announce it at http://msdn.com/live. We look forward to getting your feedback and learning what you are able to build with the Windows Live Messenger APIs using the Windows Live Messenger Add-in SDK.

The LiveSide.net blog (an independent web site not related to Microsoft) just posted a podcast show (Interview with Ken Levy, Product Planner for the Windows Live Platform, 20 minute MP3) they did with me last week about the new Windows Live Add-in hooks for developers and other developer-centric discussions related to the Windows Live Platform.

Plans for improving live.com and lessons learned

klevy — Wed, 26 Apr 2006 03:09:00 GMT

Rick Strahl blogged yesterday Live.com – I don't get it with good observations about performance and usability of live.com, as well as asking about what the goals are for the site itself. I read the blog post today and then forwarded it to people working on the live.com site (which is still in beta) suggesting that we post some blog entries clarifying what live.com is and what to expect in the future.

Scott Isaacs blogged What we have learned building Live.com (or why are we slow)?.

The live.com team blogged Improving Live.com. You can post comments on the live.com blog with comments, questions, and feedback.

Searching on "Windows Live" using Windows Live Search

klevy — Wed, 19 Apr 2006 12:05:00 GMT

There is a bunch of cool and useful new functionality on live.com, the Windows Live home page for Search, gadgets, and more. For some quick examples:

Search Web for "Windows Live"
General web search results on "Windows Live".

Search News for "Windows Live"
Search results filtered on news and article sources.

Search Feeds for "Windows Live"
Filtered search on RSS at Atom XML content on the web, generally blogs as well as web sites that publish RSS and Atom feeds.

Search Images for "Windows Live"
Returns gallery of images tagged with "Windows Live". The results are an interesting way to discover web sites (Microsoft and non-Microsoft) that relate to Windows Live.

Search Academic for AJAX
Since there is no academic content on Windows Live (yet), here is the Academic search results on the term AJAX. I selected the search of AJAX since the live.com site enables great new user experience features using AJAX for things like quick result scrolling with the mouse wheel and scroll bars, hovering over hyperlinks to dynamically popup link source content, personalization, etc.

Search Rick Steves' Travel Center on Windows Live Local
To show an example of Windows Live Local search, this is the result of searching "Rick Steves" in "Edmonds, WA" just north of Seattle. I used this example since I recently blogged about Rick Steves' store. Windows Live Local is a web application powered by Virtual Earth.

Microsoft's Experimentation Platform for Windows Live

klevy — Wed, 19 Apr 2006 10:58:00 GMT

Yesterday, Ronny Kohavi (a general manager in Windows Live division) created a new web site at http://exp-platform.com/.

The Experimentation Platform will enable product groups at Microsoft and developers using Windows Live to innovate using controlled experiments with live users. Such a platform will enable testing new ideas quickly using the best-known scientific method for establishing causality between a feature and its effects: randomized experimental design. <continued>

The primary part of the site is the Experimentation Platform - Job Descriptions page. The actual catalyst behind Ronny creating this new web site was that the Microsoft Careers site currently only allows up to 4,000 characters per job description, and more text was needed for many of the position openings in this new Windows Live team.

There is also a page on the site with a growing list referencing Cool Things about Microsoft and Windows Live.

Direct inquiries about job openings is found on the Contact Us page.

The new Experimentation Platform web site is powered by Office Live.

Rock stars continue to join the Windows Live band

klevy — Fri, 14 Apr 2006 21:37:00 GMT

In 1988, I went to a Monsters of Rock concert at the L.A. Coliseum with headlining bands like Van Halen, Scorpions, Metallica (my three favorite hard rock bands). Nearly 100,000 people where rockin'.

In the spirit of an all-star rock concert, I want to highlight some of of the many great people who have recently joined the Windows Live division. Some of them are moving from other Microsoft teams and others are joining Microsoft as new employees. There is no particular order to the list below:

David LaVallee - David is one of the original Java creators during the early Java years. He recently joined Microsoft in the Windows Live division. Scoble blogged about the hiring of David LaVallee:

Steve Ball invited Buzz and I over to a party at his new house tonight. He’s the guy who runs the media teams on Windows. Quite a good guitarist too. What’s fun is you can listen to his music too. But at the party I met some interesting technologists. Steve introduced me to David LaVallee. Don’t know who David is? I didn’t either. But he worked with Steve Jobs for years and, while at Apple, was the guy who pushed Jobs to buy Garageband. He also worked on the original Java team and at Disney for a while. He’s now working at Microsoft on the MSN Messenger team. His blog is fun to read. <continued>

Ronny Kohavi - Ronny is a top expert in Machine Learning and comes to Windows Live from Amazon.com where he was their Director of Data mining and Personalization. Several of Ronny's papers are in the top cited papers in this field. He recently joined Microsoft in the Windows Live division to build an experimentation platform.

Bill Zissimopoulos - Bill was recently on the Visual Studio team here at Microsoft. Previously Bill was an architect at AOL who responsible for the design and implementation of parts of AOL’s trusted security and transactional infrastructures for their datacenters. Bill works as a lead developer working on core Windows Live developer platform efforts.

Danny Thorpe - Danny was the former Chief Scientist at Borland, left Borland in October 2005 and then went to work at Google. This week Danny joined Microsoft to work as a senior program manager architect in Windows Live. Danny started a new blog today and posted about joining Windows Live:

Greetings! My name is Danny Thorpe and I am happy to announce that I have recently joined Microsoft's Windows Live Platform team. What's the Windows Live Platform team? They're the folks bent on organizing, unifying, fleshing out and defining new APIs and SDKs to enable software developers from all camps to leverage Windows Live services in their own applications and interoperate with the world at scale. Some of you who know me from my years at Borland working on Delphi stuff may have wondered where I disappeared to. I've just completed a stint at Google to help create some cool stuff in the "web as an application platform" space. That's well on its way now, so hopefully we'll see some manifestation of it show up on Google Labs in the next year or so. Now I'm setting about figuring out some cool stuff for Windows Live! One part of the challenge is to chip away at the mountain of Microsoft service API todos that the guys here have already identified as "must haves" and "minimum requirements". <continued>

Yaron Goland - Yaron has just joined Microsoft from BEA to work on Windows Live. At BEA he was the Director of Technology and he is one of the leading experts in REST, XML, and message passing systems.

Niall Kennedy - Niall just joined Microsoft's Windows Live division to create a new product team around syndication technologies such as RSS and Atom. He will help build a feed syndication platform leveraged by Microsoft products and developers all around the world. Dare Obasanjo blogged about Niall Kennedy joining Windows Live:

I spoke to Niall on the phone last week and I'm glad to see that he accepted our offer. When I was first hired to work in MSN Windows Live I was told I'd be working on three things; a blogging platform for MSN Spaces, a brand new social networking platform and an RSS platform. I've done the first two and was looking forward to working on the third but something has come up which will consume my attention for the near future. I promised the my management and the partner teams who were interested in this platform that I'd make sure we got the right person to work on this project. When I found out Niall was leaving Technorati it seemed like a match made in heaven. I recommended him for the job and talked to him on the phone about working at Microsoft. The people who will be working with him thought he was great and the rest has been history. <continued>

I'm super enthused about getting to work with many of these new people joining Windows Live. I recently joined the Windows Live team moving over from the developer tools division, now on Scott's Swanson product planning team. What I work on is the planning details for an upcoming new cool web site for Windows Live developers, the API roadmap for platform services, and activities around building developer communities. This means I will be working closely with Danny Thorpe which I'm really looking forward to.

This is just some of the incredible hiring momentum occurring here recently in the Windows Live division. There are many Windows Live job openings at Microsoft on the Microsoft Careers web site. And if you don't join the band, then join us online "Live" with our products, services, and platform. We we have many concerts lined up including TechEd 2006 in June. TechEd events are known to have rock concerts as part of the fun. I saw the band Cheap Trick play at TechEd 1998. I wish we could get Spinal Tap to play at this upcoming TechEd 2006 in Boston, since this one is gonna to go to eleven!

Enduring adventures to Antarctica and Microsoft

klevy — Fri, 14 Apr 2006 21:36:00 GMT

I was inspired to blog this entry based on a comment posted by Danny Thorpe on my recent blog post I made about Shackleton's adventure story in Antarctica, where he commented:

If you have a yen for travel, it's possible to retrace Shackleton's steps yourself. Lindblad Expeditions runs an extended photography tour about once a year (see: http://tinyurl.com/9xadr) on the polar explorer ship "Endeavor" that usually includes stops at South Georgia Island and at Point Wild on Elephant Island. In the few days at sea without landings, the Lindblad staff dig into the Shackleton story in amazing detail. There's nothing quite like actually being there. http://tinyurl.com/loggf.

I've heard about this photography adventure trip to Antarctica. In fact, Susan Graham who I use to work with here at Microsoft (who worked at Fox Software and then Microsoft retired in the late 90s) actually went on that same trip to Antarctica in January 2004. She is a close friend to this day, and after her trip to Antarctica she showed me some photos when she returned. The photos were pretty amazing and she said the trip was far more spectacular than she had anticipated. She went on the trip with a friend, and the boat had about 200 people on board. The story goes that she was on deck during the boat ride out of Argentina heading for Antarctica when she heard a voice say "Susan, is that you?". The person who recognized her was actually the former president of the company she use to work for years ago at Fox Software, Dr. Dave Fulton, who went on to become the head of database strategy at Microsoft in the early 90s after Microsoft bought Fox Software. What are the odds of meeting someone you know on a boat to Antarctica?? I guess we could say: Big continent, small world. Just before that trip, Susan had finished a project as executive producer of a documentary called 200 Cadillacs which details the generosity of Elvis Presley, including details of how he cars as gifts to people. I guess word got around on the boat about this documentary and they ended up playing the Elvis documentary one night for the travelers and crew on the boat. When we launched Visual FoxPro (VFP) version 9.0 at DevCon in late 2004, in the keynote session I showed a photo of Susan and Dr. Dave from that trip as well as a recent video interview Susan did with Dr. Dave talking about the past and present FoxPro days.

For a good quick summary of Dr. Dave Fulton's role in the evolution of desktop databases on PCs, below is an abstract from a session given by Jeb Long at a Visual FoxPro conference in 2004:

dBASE and FoxPro from Jeb Long perspective

Where did VFP (Visual FoxPro) come from? Well, in this session, you will learn. It all began in 1973 at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, USA, when a database management system was born called JPLDIS. In 1979, Wayne Ratliff working as a contractor at JPL, wrote a program to help him with football pools, called Vulcan. Vulcan was based on JPLDIS. Vulcan ran on an 8-bit 8080 microcomputer running under CP/M. George Tate started Ashton-Tate to market Vulcan (renamed dBASE II) for Wayne. Then Jeb Long (who created JPLDIS) converted dBASE II to run on the IBM PC under MSDOS and dBASE II became famous. Jeb and Wayne left JPL to join Ashton-Tate and developed dBASE III. Meanwhile Dr. David Fulton and some of his computer science students thought dBASE III was a terrific program so they cloned it resulting in FoxBase+. Ashton-Tate developed dBASE IV and sued Fox Software. Fox cloned dBASE IV and produced FoxPro 2.5. Ashton-Tate was bought by Borland. Borland dropped the lawsuit. Fox Software merged with Microsoft and the rest is history.

In the early 90s, I had successfully used FoxPro 2.0 DOS version as a touch screen front end in a public safety dispatch product used by various agencies including the California Highway Patrol communications center. It was rare to use FoxPro in a mission critical real-time application rather than a traditional accounting or inventory application back then. I had shown the FoxPro based application to Hal Pawluk who at the time was a key marketing guy at Fox Software. After FoxPro was bought by Microsoft in '92, word got around to a few people the details of the way I was using FoxPro in a mission-critical product. In 1992, one of the FoxPro product managers was Tod Neilsen, who invited me to a database summit meeting at Microsoft along with about 50 well known FoxPro industry experts and influencers. We got to meet the newly merged FoxPro team, Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, Mike Maples, Dr. Dave Fulton, and others. At an evening dinner at Bill Gates' old house, I happen to get in line for dessert just before Bill did and I ended up talking to him about the FoxPro application that I wrote for use by public safety dispatch systems. He was curious about it and asked to see a demo. The following month I ended up meeting Bill again and I spent about 15 minutes showing him a demo of demo of the FoxPro based application I had designed and developed. Dr. Dave Fulton was one of the people in the hotel suite for that meeting.

At the dinner at Bill's house, I sat at the table with about 5 other people including Adam Green and Tom Rettig. It was the first time I had met Adam Green, who was then probably the most well known industry guru in the dBase community. Tom became a close friend of mine soon after that event, and I use to hang out at his place in Marina Del Rey fairly often and I would go to his various annual parties. Sometime in 1995, I was over at Tom's apartment one evening. He and I had just come back from dinner at Benihana's down the street, walking distance from his place. When suddenly there was a knock at his door, it was his next door neighbor who had locked himself out of his own place and needed to hop over to his balcony to get in. His next door neighbor was Roger Clinton, former president Bill Clinton's half brother. Roger was a fun guy who was a musician, he would come to Tom's parties, and you wouldn't have guessed that his brother had just become president. I recall being the first geek on the block to have a handheld laser pointer, and when I let Roger try it out he ended up spending more time with it than I did shining it on boats going in and out of the harbor at night.

In 1993 I went to work as a contractor at JPL working on FoxPro based add-on productivity tools and OOP related efforts for teams developing various MIS solutions, While there I got to meet Jeb Long. In some ways, Jeb was the original developer who's program lead to the first database applications on the personal computer. That year I wrote a utility called GenScrnX that extended the FoxPro 2.x GenScrn program. The first person I showed GenScrnX to was Y. Alan Griver (yag), then co-founder of Flash Creative Management. I joined Flash in 1993 after JPL reporting directly to yag working on add-ons that shipped in the box of Visual FoxPro 3.0 like the Class Browser. Eric Rudder was the group program manager and architect for VFP 3.0. Many of the great OO and data-centric features added to VFP 3.0 have continued to evolve in VFP as well as into Visual Studio as well as the VB and C# .NET programming languages. When the VFP 3.0 Xbase projects ended when VFP 3.0 was released, I left Flash and became a full-time contractor at Microsoft working on the VFP team. Flash ended up being bought by GoAmerica where yag became CIO, then yag joined Microsoft in early 2002 and soon after was the of the VS Data and VFP teams, and I reported to him directly (again). I also worked with lead program manager Randy Brown and lead developer Calvin Hsia working on VFP past the release of version VFP 9.0.

I was inspired to write my GenScrnX utility for FoxPro 2.x after I had seen a demo of an early preview of Borland's dBase for Windows shown at a user group by then Xbase industry expert Adam Green. The next time I was to meet up with Adam Green was just a few weeks ago at the Mashup Camp event in Mountain View, Calif. I chatted with Adam at the Mashup Camp event for about 30 minutes. He showed me on his notebook computer that he still uses Visual FoxPro today to build his own desktop database applications - there were Fox icons all over his Windows desktop. Some of our chat included the past and other parts included why we were at the event - to learn more and discuss mashups and possible tangible outcomes of what is being called the Web 2.0. These days, Adam Green spends most of his independent business efforts in the Web 2.0 area, just as I do in my new role in the Windows Live Platform team. I discovered that Adam now has a great blog http://darwinianweb.com/. He also has an archived blog at http://adamgreen.org/ where he has some great MP3 podcast shows. For historical references on the topic of Xbase history, a great podcast Adam created is Software Stories #6 about the rise and fall of Ashton-Tate and the details of how the company was bought by Borland. This particular podcast is a interview is with Ron Dennis, Russell Freeland, Rick Chapman, and Hal Pawluk. Lots more Ashton-Tate history details on Wikipedia.

After Borland bought Ashton-Tate, Borland had some very well known developer tools industry experts including Anders Hejlsberg who created Turbo Pascal and started Delphi. Anders is now at Microsoft and is the lead architect of C#. Some additional irony here is that I recently spent nearly 5 years as the product manager for Visual FoxPro, the same job Tod Neilsen had over 12 years ago. Tod recently became the CEO of Borland. If I talked to Tod today, I would thank him for inviting me to the database summit at Microsoft in 1992. For some interesting history about Delphi, Danny Thorpe wrote an article on Borland's web site Why the name "Delphi?". In a quick photo image search on "Danny Thorpe" using live.com, I found a photo of Danny Thorpe in Antarctica taken in November 2003. This means Danny was probably on the boat trip to Antarctica just before the one that Susan Graham and Dr. Dave Fulton were on in January 2004.

In late February 2006, I moved from the developer division here at Microsoft and joined the Windows Live Platform team as a product planner on Scott Swanson's team. Scott is a group product planner for Windows Live Platform and has a strong developer background. He was on the VB and VSCore team's here at Microsoft and worked recently worked on the Messenger Activity SDK. Defining the 'platform' in the Windows Live Platform team, the platform is about working on unified API roadmap across all Windows Live services, to release great new content online such as SDKs and sample code, as well as new developer community activities. Some

Now back to how this all relates to Danny's comment submitted on my post Endurance and leadership of Sir Ernest Shackleton... Like some memorable movies endings like in the Sixth Sense and the original Twilight Zone TV show, this post as a bit a twist at the end.

Danny Thorpe, former Chief Scientist at Borland, left Borland 4 months ago and joined Google. This week (on April 10, 2006) Danny Thorpe joined Microsoft to work on the recently formed Windows Live Platform team. Danny is joining George Moore's team, a rapidly growing team working on new developer focused projects for Windows Live services and APIs. Nearly all of my responsibilities as a product planner on the Windows Live Platform team involves working with George's new team. Danny Thorpe's created a new blog today at http://blogs.msdn.com/dthorpe/. While there might not be much going on in Antarctica, there is rolling thunder activity going on here at Microsoft in the Windows Live division.

Slides from Windows Live Platform sessions at Mix06

klevy — Fri, 14 Apr 2006 06:53:00 GMT

PowerPoint slide decks from all Windows Live (7 total) sessions from Mix06 are online at the links below. On demand videos of all Mix06 sessions will be going online soon.