Pedro Silva's Blog : Misc

Changing blog layout

PedroSilva — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 19:39:00 GMT

Well, I tried using a prettier stylesheet layout for my blog, but it's not very good at should code. It doesn't use the screen real estate very well... Oh well, it was worth a shot. But, now I'm going back to a code-friendly layout.

Comic Sans typeface

PedroSilva — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 18:48:00 GMT

Apparently there's quite an upheaval over the Comic Sans typeface... with folks even wishing to ban it (there's a Ban Comic Sans movement even). Though I think they could probably use a new hobby... :)

Don't know, I've always kind of liked that font... not that developers are a good measure of aesthetics.

Happy Easter

PedroSilva — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 19:41:00 GMT

Had a really good week talking with a lot of customers at our VSIP clinic. Met a lot of the folks extending Visual Studio in cool interesting ways. It did remind me how much I enjoy helping folks out with our products... Sometimes that gets a little lost when we're so concentrated on delivering new features for the next product release. But, it's nice to be reminded why we do it. :)

And, somehow it's already Easter (hope everyone will have a good one)... It seems to me like we just started the new year, but here we are already. Time flies when you're integrating code across lots of TFS source branches... :P

This Not Blogging Has Got to Stop

PedroSilva — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 19:10:00 GMT

I've been busily working on Visual Studio 10 and haven't had much time for blogging. I know that's a pretty lame excuse, but it's the only one I have. Being a development lead I spend a lot of time in meetings, triaging bugs, and dealing with fires in builds and integrations, so I haven't had much exciting news. But, now that there's a Visual Studio 10 CTP out, and Beta 1 coming soon... it's a good time to start talking about some of the things we've been working on.

I'm also going to be learning WPF much more deeply, so I'll probably share what tidbits I gleen on here as well.

SkyDrive Beta Today

PedroSilva — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 21:27:00 GMT

The latest Windows Live service just went into Beta this morning - SkyDrive. SkyDrive is a hard drive in the cloud that lets you save personal files out on the web. Along with private folders that only you can access, it also lets you create shared folders that can be viewed by other registered users or completely public for everyone to see. This will be a really cool service for backing up some data files that you need to share across machines. And, it could definitely be the basis for some interesting content sharing applications between a web of friends. It will be interesting to see this Beta and the tools that come out around it.

Microsoft Moves Ahead with Software Modeling

PedroSilva — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 18:57:00 GMT

There's an interesting story in eWeek about Microsoft's work on Software Modeling. A lot of discussion about the future, but DSL Tools is really the present and the tip of the spear for a lot of the work that Microsoft is doing in software modeling. As the DSL runtime evolves we'll get more functionality that will help with modeling, including integrating DSLs in more closely with Software Factories.

Also, as more groups begin producing models based on DSLs, we'll start to see a real ecosystem of designers that can be used, reused for specific purposes, and extended by customers.

So, what do you as customers think of the move to software modeling? And, coding by designers and factories? Is this really where the future of software development is heading? I'd love to hear your thoughts on the matter...

Funny Thing Happened While I Was Walking Down the Hallway

PedroSilva — Thu, 23 Mar 2006 20:52:00 GMT

I was walking down the hallway, heading home yesterday evening, and I see Ali jumping across the hallway from his office into another office with an open door. I'm thinking: hmm, that's a little strange. Why would he be doing that? But, apparently, his blog explains all... :)

C# For XBox 360 Development

PedroSilva — Wed, 22 Mar 2006 20:54:00 GMT

There have been lots of great news from the Game Developer's Conference this year. But, my favorite thus far is the announcement that C# will be supported in XNA for developing games for the XBox 360. I think this is great and will allow small companies to quickly create games for XBox. Tie that to the XBox Live market place for casual games, and small developers will have a good way of distributing these games too.

New Windows Desktop Search UI

PedroSilva — Tue, 21 Feb 2006 19:19:00 GMT

Microsoft Research has created a cool new UI plug-in for Windows Desktop Search, called Phlat, that does much better querying and filtering and seemlessly integrate search and browse functionality. If you like Desktop Search, but want a better interface to the results, this is definitely a plug-in to check out.

[via Greg]

First Blog-iversary

PedroSilva — Thu, 19 Jan 2006 00:00:00 GMT

It was a year ago today that I posted my first entry to this blog, talking about Whitehorse (the enterprise designers for VSTS 2005). Since then, there's been lots of posts and a change over to talking about DSL Tools, as my job has been more focused on that since last March. It's been fun writing about these things and getting comments and emails from readers. So, let's start the second year for this blog...

Appropriately, my blog-iversary appears to be on the same day as Scoble's birthday. Coincidence? Probably... :)

BillG, That's The End Calling...

PedroSilva — Wed, 14 Dec 2005 19:34:00 GMT

I've been patiently watching and listening to a campaign run by a local radio station (107.7 The End) to get Bill Gates on their show for an interview and their music challenge (where they face-off two local celebrities to pick their best song to play and then voted on by listeners). They started off with pleas on the radio, then a website (http://www.getbillgates.com), and even tried to contact him in person and through the Microsoft PR folks. But, no luck yet. I listen to the radio show every morning on my way in to work, and I've been hoping that they would get their interview because I think it would be really fun. So, here's my attempt to get them some more visibility...

Their "Thursday Music Challenge" is good, clean fun. Usually two contestants face off with their song choices. Typically, they've done this with local celebrities, like weathermen, the guy from the gardening show, news folk, etc. The contestant gets to pick the best song they can (any genre, any time). They play the songs. Listeners call in and vote for the song they like the best.

107.7 The End is a moderately recognizable radio station outside of the western Washington area because they started around 1992 and were involved in "discovering" many of the local grunge bands of the early 90s. And, for breaking some of the newer Seattle bands, like: Death Cab for Cutie, Aqueduct, Vendetta Red, etc. And, they were the radio station that all of the people work at on MTVs Real World Seattle.

So, Bill, if you read this blog (yeah, right?), could you go on the show, give an interview, and play their music challenge? It will be fun and a good way to get some local PR.

Or, if any other Microsoft bloggers or readers have any sway with Bill or our PR group (I talking about you Scoble), could you help out?

Finally, those of you outside of the Seattle area can listen too because The End stream their broadcast live online (I think you need to sign up for a free user account though).

UConn Huskies Ranked #3

PedroSilva — Tue, 08 Nov 2005 02:13:00 GMT

The UConn Huskies, my alma mater, is ranked #3 in the preseason NCAA Mens' Basketball poll. It's nice to see the Huskies highly ranked again -- last year was a bit of a disappointment after their championship in 2004. The road is going to be tough though, especially early on, since their starting point guard is suspended until Jan 3rd.

But, here's hoping for a great 2006 season and tournament in March.

RSS Feed Authoring Tool

PedroSilva — Fri, 04 Nov 2005 02:48:00 GMT

Duncan MacKenzie created a tool to create an RSS 2.0 file from user entered data rather than as a feed from a blogging engine. Sometimes you have content that you want a feed for without it necessarily being in your blogging engine. Duncan created this for use on MSDN, so that some of they're article headlines could be in an RSS feed even if they weren't in the content management system.

It's pretty cool, so if you need to produce RSS files for content outside of a blogging engine, this could be useful.

Chief Engineer Scotty, Beaming Up

PedroSilva — Wed, 20 Jul 2005 21:01:00 GMT

It's a sad day. Our favorite chief engineer passed away today. James Doohan (Star Trek's Scotty) died early this morning.

Doohan died at 5:30 a.m. (1330 GMT) at his Redmond, Washington, home with his wife of 28 years, Wende, at his side, Los Angeles agent and longtime friend Steve Stevens said. The cause of death was pneumonia and Alzheimer's disease, he said.

Scotty was always one of my favorite Star Trek characters. I think I modeled some of my project and task estimation ability from that character -- it'll take 3 days to fix that bug, but for you it will be done in an hour...

I'm sorry to see you go...

[via BoingBoing]

Twelve Pounds Is A Lot of M&Ms

PedroSilva — Wed, 22 Jun 2005 00:16:00 GMT

It's a Microsoft custom on your hire-date anniversary to provide 1 pound of M&Ms for every year that you've been with the company. Today is my anniversary. I started at Microsoft on June 21, 1993 (yeah that's right 93). A lot has changed in the last 12 years. At the time, Microsoft was still shipping Windows 3.1, Visual Basic 3.0, and Visual C++ 1.0. There were about 14000 employees, and Microsoft's revenue was $3.8 billion per year.

I actually did my first stint at Microsoft as an intern from Jan through Aug of 1992, working on Multimedia Viewer, which was the platform on which Encarta and some of the other media titles were built on. I joined the same group as a full-time employee in June of 93, but they had moved on to creating multimedia authoring tools for interactive TV. Amazingly enough Microsoft started investigations into interactive TV back then, and we spent a year and a half working on prototypes and spinning our wheels, until that effort was disbanded and teams spunoff into other areas.

Our team continue working on media tools and eventually shipped Media Manager 1.0, which was a media content management system that plugged into the Windows 95 shell as an extension. It provided special properties for file types, and custom user-definable properties, a full-text indexing and search mechanism which included properties, a thumbnail view (along with the other explorer views) of the files, and an in-place player within the thumbnail view which let you play video and audio files, without having to open each one. I worked on the thumbnail view and the in-place players. Many of you are probably familiar with the thumbnail view, because it was eventually moved into the core explorer and today allows you to see previews of your photos.

Then, I worked on the Encarta World Atlas for about 3.5 years. In that time, we shipped 4 versions of our product -- we shipped on a yearly cycle targetting the back-to-school sales. Atlas was a lot of fun. We fit the world on a CD with rich, vivid map data and interesting content from around the world. The mapping engine was shared with the other geography products of the time: Streets and Trips. And, eventually evolved into MapPoint and the map server products that we provide today. For content display, we used an embedded IE window and HTML, which was a departure from the Encarta display technology (which was still based on a newer version of MediaView -- the product I originally worked on as an intern). My last year with the Encarta team was as the development lead for World Atlas.

Next, came a three year stint on the MSDN content creation team. We wrote in-depth technical articles and developed samples, like Duwamish 4.0, Duwamish Online, and a myriad of web service samples. Of note, the first Microsoft WebService Toolkit was created by our team in 2000. For the last 1.5 years there, I was the group manager for the content team with several writers and developers working for me, including Dr. GUI.

For the last 2.5 years, I've been working on Whitehorse and DSL Tools. I started working on the core design surface, which is the diagramming surface used by all of the VS2005 designers. This was long before we ever decided that the underlying core libraries would be documented and released for public consumption as DSL Tools. I also worked on the Application Designer making sure you could design distributed service-based applications with our designer. And, today I'm back fixing up the core libraries to make them more easily understandable and useable for people who want to create their own DSL designer.

See how quickly 12 years can add up... and pass...