Rajmohan's real-time web...

Office - Live Comm Server demo

rajmohan — Thu, 12 Aug 2004 21:18:00 GMT

I watched this really cool demo of Office Live Comm Server product (thanks to my colleague who sent this link). You can see how these new products, now and in the future, can enhance your business opportunities by exploiting the real-time communications/collaboration technologies. LCS 2005 has even more powerful features such as federation (Instant Messaging across enterprises).

IntelliSense gets more power in Whidbey

rajmohan — Thu, 12 Aug 2004 08:57:00 GMT

IntelliSense has got even more powerful in Whidbey(Visual Studio 2005). After using Whidbey for few projects, it is so compelling, it is kind of tough to switch back!

As you can see, there is an icon for properties (little hand with a sheet, the standard icon for properties in all MS products) that shows up in the IntelliSense. Dont you think it would be cool to be able to distinguish a read-only-property(only 'get' implemented) from read-write-property (both 'get' and 'set' implemented) 'icon'ically? This would prevent the developers from making compilation errors by assigning some value to a read-only property. As always, prevention is better than cure :) ! Leave your comment and let me see if I can make a case to the VS team :).

Microsoft Picnic

rajmohan — Mon, 02 Aug 2004 00:41:00 GMT

This weekend is picnic time for Microsoft folks here in Redmond. Me and my wife went to the company picnic yesterday. This being our first picnic we were amazed by the enormity of everything there - the number of employees with their kids and family members who showed up, the variety of the free food(drinks, ice-cream, cake etc.,), enough activities/games to keep everyone busy and the size of the picnic ground itself (in a beautiful location and background view)! It was more like a theme park out there built just for the Microsoft employees and their families. Very well organized!!

Whidbey rocks!!

rajmohan — Mon, 26 Jul 2004 23:41:00 GMT

I tried Visual Studio 2005 (Whidbey) today, particularly to make use of the class designer feature. Visual Studio has been my favourite shrink-wrap product among all Microsoft products (of course, in addition to the product out of my group - LCS 2005 which is also in beta currently :-). I think Whidbey really rocks and the class designer feature is very cool and will make developers/designers life easier. Check out Ramesh's blogs (he is part of the class designer feature team in Whidbey) to learn more about this feature.

Recursion and Nature

rajmohan — Sat, 24 Jul 2004 09:04:00 GMT

Recursive programming is one of the interesting programming paradigms, that helps to solve many coding problems elegantly with few lines of code (though it makes debugging little difficult and computing the running time is not straight forward). Binary tree algorithms make use of recursion a lot. I was just amazed when I came to know that recursion is such a common phenomena in nature. This page here shows how Fibonacci number (which has this recursive property) is observed in nature. Nature's way of programming?!

Data Structures in C#

rajmohan — Tue, 20 Jul 2004 09:25:00 GMT

Data Structures&Algorithms is one of the basic courses in computer science and programming questions related to data structures such as linked lists, binary tress are focused a lot in Microsoft's SDE, SDE/T interviews (More than 50% of the coding questions in my interview were related to linked lists). Scott Mitchell of 4GuysFromRolla had authored series of articles about data structures in C# in MSDN. It might be helpful to ramp up data structures in C# or to learn from scratch.

Here are the links of all the articles:

Part 1: An Introduction to Data Structures

Part 2: The Queue, Stack, and Hashtable

Part 3: Binary Tress and BSTs

Part 4: Building a Better Binary Search Tree

Part 5: From Trees to Graphs

Part 6: Efficiently Representing Sets

SDE/T - What is it?!

rajmohan — Sun, 18 Jul 2004 09:57:00 GMT

When I say that my job title is Software Development Engineer in Test, it is not easy for many to relate to it and realize more about the day-to-day responsibilities. Not many companies have this specific role that focuses on test related development (Or even if they have, the title might be Software Developer or Software Engineer). Zoe's post on SDE/T explains in detail and very accurately about this role (required skill sets, career path etc.,). I wouldnt be surprised if many of the developers get passionate about this role and decide to apply for these openings (there are about 250 such openings in Microsoft's career page all the time). In addition to the regular white-board coding questions, one can expect follow-up questions on testing or questions focusing only on test aptitude in SDE/T interviews.

Office - LCS 2005 (Enterprise IM product) can talk with MSN, Yahoo and AOL contacts

rajmohan — Fri, 16 Jul 2004 20:05:00 GMT

Just a quick post about this breaking news that came out from our group. Microsoft Office - LCS 2005 will have the connection pack that will allow linking MSN, Yahoo and AOL users to Enterprise IM. It turns out that, this will give access to about 400 million IM users to the companies using LCS software. (I will be working on a component that is related to this :).

Finding your way to One Microsoft Way

rajmohan — Thu, 15 Jul 2004 09:43:00 GMT

I was just thinking about the first topic that I want to blog about. Thanks to Heather's recent post about contracting position at Microsoft, I thought this will be a good topic to start with! I was working in Microsoft Business Solutions group as an a- (pronounced as “ay-dash”, Heather's blog explains about this) until three weeks back and joined Office - Live Communications Server group in a full-time position recently. From my personal experience, I can completely agree with whatever Heather has written!

If you strongly believe that Microsoft is the place you want to be then you can definitely be here in one way or the other (full-time, a- or v-). I know so many smart people out there who deserves to be here, but didnt or couldnt get an opportunity for screening/interviewing here in Redmond. Also, there might be few candidates who slip through the crack or just unfortunate (for whatever reasons that important interview day wasnt your day and didnt do your best to demonstrate your abilities to work here). For all such candidates and other candidates who have the passion and potential (sounds like the Microsoft slogan?!, trust me, IMHO, it matters a lot here), these contracting positions give a great hope! Beware, getting a contract position doesnt automatically guarantee a full-time position in Microsoft, there is no such thing as contract-to-hire, in the best of my knowledge. You will have another day long (at least, in some cases more than a day :) interviews and even before the interview what and how you have contributed so far as a contractor to the group you are working for. There are so many agency temps(a- roles) and vendors (v- roles) that Microsoft works with and as Heather mentioned if you network with the right people and find the right recruiters, you will be here pretty soon than you think....

I plan to write more blogs about Microsoft Recruiting soon.

Blogging for change!

rajmohan — Wed, 14 Jul 2004 04:31:00 GMT

I am excited about blogging - a powerful to way to connect with people - colleagues, developers, customers... I joined recently in Microsoft Office - Live Communications Server group. I hope to do some interesting blogging!