Cool Client Stuff : General

Goodbye!

rprabhu — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 00:13:00 GMT

After 4½ wonderful years here at Microsoft, I have decided it is time for a change, and am going to pursue my career outside the company.

This was a tough decision, since Microsoft is a great company to work for and I have learnt a lot here, had great fun, and best of all, worked with so many smart and passionate people and made so many friends. However, change is a part of life, and after careful evaluation of the pros and cons of leaving, I have decided this shift is the right move for me.

Unfortunately, this means I will be discontinuing this blog on MSDN. I haven't been blogging much recently, but I have enjoyed writing the last 3 years about topics ranging from the .NET Framework and Visual Studio, to Live Search. I will now be taking a break from blogging for a while, but may some day pop up again elsewhere to rejoin the blogosphere.

Till then, thanks for reading and all the encouragement and comments. Good luck and good bye!

Channel 9 videos are great fun!

rprabhu — Fri, 10 Feb 2006 12:14:00 GMT

Wow, first post in a long time, and the first in 2006! Since switching teams back in November, I have been settling down into my new team and was then on vacation for a while, so didn't get a chance to post. Well, we have a bunch of cool stuff coming up this year in MSN Search, so I hope to blog about it as and when we launch something exciting! There should be some fun stuff as early as in the next couple of months, as folks who were at Search Champs may already know.

Anyway, I have been really enjoying watching some great videos on Channel 9. Inspite of being on the 'inside' in Microsoft, the company being so large, one rarely knows much about what's going on elsewhere in the division, let alone in other divisions. It is great to get an insight into what's happening around the company, and more importantly, the people behind it all.

Here are some of my favorite picks, the ones I enjoyed the most (and there are so many that I haven't viewed, so maybe there are some I will like even more!):

Any Anders Hejlsberg interview - and there are quite a few of them. It is amazing to follow the thought process of one of Microsoft's most brilliant architects. I really love C# as a programming language for 3 reasons: it is simple, logical and elegant. Anders is the reason for that.
Here is a two part series with Jim Gray, another Microsoft superstar. If you ever wondered what it would be like to engage a Turing award winner in a conversation about his work, this is your chance.
The Going Deep series is fascinating - there is so much to learn and grasp from nearly every video here. Personally, the one I enjoyed the most was this two part series on the Windows driver model. No book explains these concepts and principles (both the WHAT and the WHY) as lucidly as done here.
And its not just technology - for example, this Don Box video is about how to give a great presentation - tips from the master himself.
Missed the PDC? Sure, you can see the official videos, but if you really want to get a feel for what PDC '05 was like, you should check channel 9's coverage. There are also some great 'tour' videos, like this one of the Cambridge research lab.
Finally, when you read blogs and emails regularly from people you have never actually met, have you ever wondered what they look like? Well, Channel 9 lets you find out what Raymond Chen, Larry Osterman, Chris Brumme or Dare Obasanjo look like. Funny how people often turn out quite different from how you mentally pictured them!

Which reminds me, I happened to run into Robert Scoble briefly at Search Champs the other day. For a moment, it felt like running into a colleague or close acquaintance. Then it struck me that I had never actually met him before, nor even exchanged emails for that matter! It is interesting how the blogosphere can bring out a sense of familiarity.

Anyway, thanks Robert, Charles Torre and other folks on Channel 9 for bringing us these awesome videos!

P.S.> By the way, I have made a brief appearance on Channel 9 too :-) And here is a video about MSN Search, my current team.

Whidbey Launch, Live.com and Me

rprabhu — Tue, 08 Nov 2005 13:43:00 GMT

Wow, I can't believe it's been nearly 3 months since my last post. Time does fly by. Well, a lot has happened in the interim.

We finally closed on the last few remaining bugs in Visual Studio 2005 and .NET 2.0 and this Monday, the products were officially lauched!!! It was just over three years ago that I joined Microsoft, and very soon, got involved in the early planning and development of Whidbey. I never imagined at that time what a huge release this was going to be. I now believe the productivity boost between .NET v1 and v2 is almost as much as the one between Win32/MFC and .NET itself! It is a great feeling to see something one contributed to being put to use by thousands of people worldwide. Many of you should feel proud too, given how the suggestions, bug reports and feedback you gave have so directly influenced the product.

Another major development in the last couple of weeks was ofcourse the whole Live services announcement. I played around a bit with the new Live.com page (cool url too!) and found it cool enough to make it my new home page. I have tweaked it to view several news sources (BBC, NYT, Rediff etc), sports and tech news (Slashdot ofcourse!), weather and stock quotes all on the same page, arranged and customized to my satisfaction.

One more thing, of a more personal nature. With Whidbey having shipped, I decided it was time for me to take on a different kind of challenge. Web search and information retrieval have always been very interesting to me. Google has obviously built a great search engine, but in my mind, search is far from a solved problem. As just one example, today, the onus is on the user to come up with a suitable set of keywords that you can enter to get the answers you want. Many a time, it is hard to come up with the right combination of words to express your thoughts, and the search engine often does not get the context right. Anyway, there is a lot we can do to improve the web search experience, and there are so many challenges here, like scale and relevance. Scoble and others have recently helped spark an active discussion in the blogosphere on the state of web search, and have challenged MSN Search to address these questions.

So I was intrigued and interviewed with the MSN Search development team, and found a lot of smart and passionate people there committed to take on this challenge. I have since accepted an offer from them and joined the team as of last week! It is definitely a great experience so far, and there is so much exciting stuff going on.

What happens to my blog? Well, I will continue to blog about Whidbey stuff for a while, since there are some cool things I have been meaning to write about. I may also start blogging about Search at some point, although it is still early days now. The Search team already has an active blog, as does Ken Moss, our general manager, famous in the blogosphere for his recent challenge to Mini-Microsoft.

Do give MSN Search and the new Live.com a try!

Worldwide response to Tsunami

rprabhu — Fri, 31 Dec 2004 08:37:00 GMT

The Tsunami disaster in Asia has been a sad and tragic event, but I think one bright spot amidst it all has been the amazing worldwide response to it. I don't recall the peoples of the world coming together this way ever before. Maybe the Internet has helped by spreading the message fast. You will find a mention of the Tsunami and links to help support the relief measures on the home pages of nearly every major tech company - Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Sun, Ebay and Yahoo to mention a few and also other highly visited websites like MSN. I love how Amazon is using its payment processing system to make it easy to donate.

The blogosphere too seems to be playing its part in the relief effort. Here is one good post with tons of useful information and links. It also mentions the leading aid agencies that are involved in the relief operation and how you can contribute to them.

I hope the new year 2005 will bring back normalcy and stability to the lives of the people affected by the Tsunami.

Impact of the MSDN Product Feedback Center

rprabhu — Thu, 07 Oct 2004 06:39:00 GMT

Its been quite a long time since my last blog post. We have been pretty busy over the last couple of months (and will be for a few more weeks) driving towards a high quality Beta 2 of Visual Studio 2005 (Whidbey). This next release should be far more stable, secure and complete than Beta 1. We have been resolving all kinds of bugs and design issues over the past few weeks and looking back, I am greatly impressed at the impact the recently launched MSDN Product Feedback Center has had on VS 2005.

As a sample, here are some of the issues/suggestions I personally have had a chance to look at. I think the most useful product feedback falls into the following categories:

Obscure scenario - a scenario we missed in our own tests. For example, trying to import a resource in Visual Studio with an unusual filename, like '0'. While such scenarios are quite rare, they are a source of irritation if when you do run into them, Visual Studio behaves unpredictably.
Great suggestion - we get quite a few suggestions for improving a particular feature or behavior, and some of them are real gems. I have personally seen a couple related to the Client Settings feature that fall into this category.
Feedback from third party component developers - this set of customers give us very valuable feedback about things like our component model, localization and designer infrastructure. This helps us tune these classes to allow better customization and extensibility of our feature set.

While there are (and have been) other sources of feedback like newsgroups, direct emails and dev labs, I think the product feedback center has some distinct advantages. First of all, the reach - pretty much anyone can give feedback. Second, there is a clear process for tracking every bug/suggestion we get. Nearly every single bug is looked at by the product teams. Third, due to the voting feature, we get a good idea of how many customers ran into a particular issue and consider important.

Finally, and I think this is the most important, the person who entered the bug, and also the whole community, has a chance to find out what the product team decided to do with the bug. So this is not like one of those surveys you fill out and never hear about again - you can track the bug at every stage of the process.

So once again, a big THANK YOU to everyone who gave their feedback and continue to do so! For me personally, it is very nice to see the features I implemented being put to use and a great source of satisfaction being able to address the issues real customers are seeing with the product. I am sure everyone else in the product teams feels the same!

.NET Framework SPs now available on Windows Update

rprabhu — Wed, 08 Sep 2004 16:12:00 GMT

The final versions of .NET Framework 1.1 SP1 and 1.0 SP3 are now available for download on Windows Update.

Smart Client Developer Center

rprabhu — Mon, 28 Jun 2004 09:01:00 GMT

If you haven't seen it already, check out the Smart Client Developer Center on MSDN launched earlier this month. It's a great place to start if you are looking for any kind of information relating to client application development. It also has an RSS feed. Here is the Windows Forms section.

Over 600 bloggers on blogs.msdn.com!

rprabhu — Fri, 28 May 2004 09:36:00 GMT

Wow - I just noticed the count of Microsoft bloggers on blogs.msdn.com alone has surpassed 600! And of the 7 bloggers I know of in my immediate team, 4 have their blogs on a server other than blogs.msdn.com. If you scale that up, the total number of Microsoft bloggers would be over 1400!

With Somasegar joining the blogging club (via the Scobleizer) and Eric Rudder already part of it, there can only be more encouragement for blogging! Looks like Robert Scoble has had a great influence on the blogging culture at Microsoft :-)

More bloggers from .Net Client

rprabhu — Fri, 21 May 2004 17:07:00 GMT

I just updated my post on fellow bloggers on the .Net Client team - we have two more! This is great - there is going to be a lot of useful content straight from the product team. Also, I have mentioned briefly in that post what feature areas each person works on. So now if you have a specific question about a certain feature, you know exactly whom to contact.

Fellow bloggers on the .Net Client Team

rprabhu — Sun, 01 Feb 2004 09:57:00 GMT

Brian Pepin, the Windows Forms Guru and the guy who knows the .Net designer architecture better than anybody else.
Jessica Fosler (better known as JFo) - a fellow developer on the team. She implemented most of the ToolStrip control in Whidbey, and believe me, this control is simply amazing! Make sure you read her 'Windows Forms Tips' posts.
Mike Harsh, program manager. If you have ever read posts on Windows Forms newsgroups or the forums on WindowsForms.net, you couldn't have missed Mike - he is very active on community forums.
Julien Ellie, a fellow developer, who has a great bilingual blog.

There are probably others too...I will update this list if I find their blogs.

Update:

Shawn Burke, development manager. If you have ever written designers or implemented any kind of design time customization, you have no doubt benefited by reading Shawn's articles.
Benjamin Wu, developer. Ben recently moved over to our team from Visual Studio for Devices.
Subhag Oak, developer. He worked on the design time support for ToolStrip in Whidbey, and also implemented the SplitContainer control.

New Home!

rprabhu — Sun, 11 Jan 2004 22:40:00 GMT

The move is complete - from blogs.gotdotnet.com to blogs.msdn.com. Many thanks to the MSDN/GotDotNet team for migrating all the content over and making this transition painless! .Text is pretty cool too.

Happy 2004!

rprabhu — Wed, 31 Dec 2003 23:16:00 GMT

Back from a nice month long vacation - will get back to blogging soon. Not sure when the GotDotNet blogs will be moved to their new home, but meanwhile, I will continue to post here.

On Blogging

rprabhu — Sat, 18 Oct 2003 11:31:00 GMT

I just read an interesting piece on Internet News about blogging, in the context of Microsoft, Longhorn and the PDC. I definitely think blogs have had a pretty substantial impact on the flow of information about new and existing Microsoft products. Within Microsoft, a great source of technical information is the archives of various internal mailing lists. Increasingly, I notice that a lot of that information and more is being shared broadly through blogs. Ofcourse, Google Groups helps too!

The issue with newsgroups is that you find answers to a lot of questions, but no real in depth articles and explanation. MSDN articles, on the other hand, have a lot of great information, but no real feedback/update mechanism. Blogs seem to incorporate the best of both worlds, with the added advantage of informality and a personal touch.

OneNote

rprabhu — Fri, 17 Oct 2003 10:47:00 GMT

While installing the final release build of the new Office 2003 a couple of weeks back, I also installed this thing called OneNote that was optionally offered. I didn't pay much attention to it at first, but last weekend I thought I'd check it out and played with it a bit. Turns out it is pretty cool - it allows you to jot down those little random notes that you would typically use post-it notes or notepad for. You can then organize these notes and search through them later etc. It also allows you to record audio and insert links to it next to your notes. That sounds like fun - I should try it at my next meeting :-) OneNote is beginning to look like one of those things that seem like fun at first and before you know, you are dependent on it! All you Tablet PC users out there may find it especially useful.

By the way, speaking of Office 2003, the new Outlook is pretty impressive too - it has some nice tweaks like search folders, smart tags, quick flags, reading pane to the right etc. I haven't yet used the new Word and Powerpoint, but then I don't really use those much anyway.

Back!

rprabhu — Wed, 10 Sep 2003 10:24:00 GMT

Back to blogging after a break of about 3 weeks. Added some entries under BlogRoll. I have been meaning to write some stuff about two topics: ApplicationContext and EnableVisualStyles. I will get to it soon! If anyone has any suggestions for .Net Client related topics worth blogging about, feel free to let me know.