Nonnenberg's Notes : other

C# Chats: What Topics Would You Like to See?

scottno — Fri, 18 Jun 2004 21:23:00 GMT

I have another role in addition to C# Program Manager; I am also the C# Team chat coordinator - I am responsible for finding topics, finding attendees on our team, and choosing the dates.

In the past we've attempted to come up with chat topics we think the community wants. I'll leave it up to the reader to determine how well that has worked. It seems to me that it would be good to actually allow everyone to tell us what topics they'd like to see.

So, this post is expressly for chat topic suggestions.

Leave a comment and tell me what topics you'd like to see for upcoming C# Chats.

Summer Lightning

scottno — Fri, 18 Jun 2004 18:49:00 GMT

I have to agree with Cyrus. Last night's lightning show was awe-inspiring. It all started as a beautiful end to a perfect-weather day - a towering orange cloud, just to the east of Redmond as the sun set. A few friends and I were walking around in Marymoor park enjoying the weather and the brightly-colored clouds; as we drove away from the park, we noticed some flashing in the darkness under that towering cloud.

Three hours later, the most spectacular night-time display I've seen in a long time started. Continous flashing and rumbling for I don't know how long. I stayed up on my porch watching it until 1:30...

C# Team Chat: What we did at TechEd (Thurs 6/24, 1pm PST)

scottno — Fri, 18 Jun 2004 18:41:00 GMT

A few C# Program Managers (including myself) presented at TechEd 2004 in San Diego. We thought we'd have a chat where we could answer your questions if you didn't get them answered at TechEd, or perhaps try to allow people who weren't in San Diego to experience the magic. :0)

Eric Gunnerson will be at the chat to answer questions about his and Anders' talks, DEV320 and DEV321. Joe Nalewabau will be there for his session, DEV322. I'll be there for the two sessions I co-presented, DEV354 and DEV450. A few other C# team members who went to TechEd and manned the cabanas, booths and such will be there as well. Make sure to check out the powerpoints before showing up - they're required reading. :0)

Here is a direct link into the chatroom.

Summit Summary

scottno — Thu, 15 Apr 2004 21:11:00 GMT

Thanks to all the MVPs who made it to Redmond last week. It was great interacting with you. There were so many activities I couldn't blog about all of them in a timely fashion. So I'll do it now.

Monday Night's dinner was a fun informal Microsoft/MVP mixer time. A good number of C# Team showed up, but unfortunately not too many well-known names. :0) Some people said it was a bit like a Junior High dance - MVPs talking with MVPs and Microsofties talking with Microsofties. I know that at least I wasn't just hanging with my own kind...
Tuesday's Lunch: I hosted a table. It seemed like C# MVPs didn't feel the need to sit exclusively at the C# tables, but that's really a good thing. :0) The table I hosted got into a huge discussion on how Microsoft should deal with security, specifically how they thought we should force Security down developers' throats as much as possible. One MVP said that we should even use scare tactics to galvanize developers into action...
Tuesday's Party: I'm not one to do the karaoke thing unless with good friends and the help of some liquid courage. I did get a chance to talk to several MVPs about Microsoft's attitude towards the developer community, though. It's really great to hear positive feedback on this topic, it motivates us to engage even more. I also listened to Ed Dudenhoefer talk about C++ in VS2005 - some very exciting very advanced stuff is coming from the C++ team for the next version of VS. I didn't even know about some of this stuff before listening to him.
Wednesday - C# Day: This was an extremely full day, which I had the responsibility of planning. In all, very informative sessions for both the C# Team and the MVPs.

Wednesday night I slept very well. :0) On the horizon: a How-To on creating Debugger Visualizers with the Community Tech Preview.

The Summit

scottno — Mon, 05 Apr 2004 23:13:00 GMT

The MVP Global Summit is happening. And, unfortunately, so are my normal job responsibilities. :0) I'm the MVP lead for the C# product group, which means I'm charge of our interactions with them, and I was also responsible for planning Wednesday's activities.

Today was Habib's talk about debugging enhancements to Whidbey, so I went to that. I'll be at tonight's dinner, tomorrow's lunch, tomorrow's party, and I'll be the MC for Wednesday's C# MVP actvities. Should be some good times. Say Hi if you see me!

C# and unit-testing chat Thursday 3/18

scottno — Fri, 12 Mar 2004 19:01:00 GMT

There is an MSDN chat next Thursday from 1-2pm Pacific time about C# and unit-testing. It should be a really good chat; unit-testing enthusiasts and experts will be there, including James Newkirk, Eric Gunnerson and others from the C# team.

Need to do some unit-testing studying up before the chat? Looking for a complete list of upcoming MSDN chats? Looking for the direct chatroom link?

BTW, my tooth is better now. :0)

the tooth

scottno — Thu, 26 Feb 2004 01:13:00 GMT

The Tooth. This is the fourth time this particular tooth has been damaged. Next time I think I need something a bit more serious than the standard bonding.

How did it happen, you ask? Probably the most boring way possible: I was eating lunch with Anson and Shaykat yesterday and apparently attempted to bite off a bit of pita/tortilla-ish bread incorrectly. :0)

For those of you even more curious, I'll detail how my tooth has been damaged in the past:

3rd grade: Jungle Gym. I was just sitting there minding my own business, when the metal beast attacked!! Exciting.
6th grade: Rubber Hockey Puck. Nothing serious, it just knocked out the previous fix. Remember also, that this was California - not real hockey. It was warm out and we were just running around on basketball courts. Not Exciting.
10th grade: Tennis Racquet. This was a pretty serious impact - it significantly chipped both of my two top front teeth. The incident was a bit bloody as well. Exciting.
17th grade(?): Rubbery Bread. Not exciting.
Hmm... This pattern doesn't bode well for me...

slashdot on debugging

scottno — Wed, 25 Feb 2004 01:05:00 GMT

David J. Agans' Debugging was just reviewed over on Slashdot. The book has nine debugging “rules“:

Understand the system
Make it fail
Quit thinking and look
Divide and conquer
Change one thing at a time
Keep an audit trail
Check the plug
Get a fresh view
If you didn't fix it, it ain't fixed

Three and five are rules most people have in the back of their heads but don't follow most of the time. Six is a great suggestion most people have probably never considered. But by far, of course, the most important of all these is number one: Understand the system. Without that you've got nothing. :0)

What's your most useful debugging technique/insight?

Here's a great snippet from the comments: “Teaching people how to debug isn't that easy. It requires some experience before they get the hang of it.” (pcraven)

Appweek, VS and VSS

scottno — Wed, 18 Feb 2004 19:54:00 GMT

Last week the C# QA and PM teams participated in what we call an Appweek. We split into groups of 4-6, one PM per team, and worked together on a small-scale app of our choice. Of course, small-scale is very relative term. :0) Our team chose to do a network-based Worms/Scorched Earth game - for those who don't know, Scorched Earth and Worms are great games from a few years back...

Of course this isn't the interesting part of Appweek. The interesting part is that we used a very pre-release version of Whidbey to develop said app. Quite a few major sections of Visual Studio are nowhere near Beta quality. One of these sections was Visual SourceSafe integration into VS.

Most of my source control experience has been with the well-liked classic cvs. I've used VSS professionally a few times, but I'm most comfortable with what is probably the most commonly-used source control suite. cvs does everything most people need - even for developers who use IDEs, using cvs on the command line isn't a problem.

I won't say that the experience has turned me off to VSS entirely, but it has certainly moved me in that direction. Data was lost or corrupted constantly while attempting to merge, and we had some serious annoyances with VS automatically checking out files.

Anyway, Does anyone use VSS? What do you like about VSS integration into VS? What don’t you like? If you don’t use VSS, what do you use?

In case you’re wondering, we didn’t get where we wanted to with our game. We at least got some flying and falling bombs and tanks on several different networked computers’ screens. :0)

entry point

scottno — Fri, 30 Jan 2004 05:47:00 GMT

[update: there have been some changes since this first post. Check this recent role change announcement]

Hey.

They call me Scott Nonnenberg, and I'm a Program Manager (PM) on the C# Team. But I'm actually part of a subset of that team, the Visual Studio Debugger team. So I work on things related to all the languages and technologies the VS Debugger supports, but I am technically on the C# team. Go figure. :0)

I graduated from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo in June 2003 with a BS in Computer Science. I started at Microsoft about six months ago, so I'm by far the newest PM on the C# Team. It's certainly been an interesting experience so far, and I expect it to continue as such.

In this blog you can expect me to talk about my life, my obsessions, and my job. I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to categorize my posts into one of those. :0)