Shaykatc's WebLog : Whidbey

C# Language Chat next Thursday

shaykatc — Fri, 15 Apr 2005 02:32:00 GMT

Scott Nonnenberg is running another chat next Thursday. The theme is the language - come and ask your favorite questions about the language. More details are here.

In general we schedule about 2 chats a month, and our attendance numbers show about 50-60 people attend. We like the openness of chats - is there anything specific that you would like to hear or have discussed? We were thinking of other alternatives - such as release an interview or video with a team member on the feature and then schedule a chat after it. What would be helpful for you?

Another idea is that once Beta2 ships out, we have a chat where we discuss some of the newer features in the IDE...always cool to know what got added.

Shaykat

C# favorite, must have tools...

shaykatc — Wed, 23 Mar 2005 04:25:00 GMT

I was recently going over our MSDN developer center page at http://msdn.microsoft.com/vcsharp and happened to stop by the tools page at: http://msdn.microsoft.com/vcsharp/team/tools/default.aspx

I was considering how to update it, when I thought I would ask the community instead - are there new tools that you use, that arent on this page, that you think should be?

Send us some feedback...

Shaykat

Whidbey release info

shaykatc — Tue, 22 Mar 2005 17:54:00 GMT

This news.com article has info on our release plans.

http://news.com.com/Microsoft+delays+tool%2C+database+updates/2100-1007_3-5628166.html?tag=nefd.top

To summarize, VS 2005 & SQL 2005 are planned for the second half of the year.

Book Review: Take back your life!

shaykatc — Fri, 18 Mar 2005 17:10:00 GMT

Catchy title, eh? I gotta admit, when I first saw the title, I judged the book by its cover, and thought it was going to be some awesome revolutionary, fight the man, david vs. goliath, beat the corporate rat race sort of book. Then I received a copy and read its goal - using Outlook to get organized and stay organized. Ok, not too bad, probably a simple tips and tricks book on Outlook.

And this is when Take Back your Life really surprised me. I started reading through the book and slowly got immersed. The book details a set of problems that probably everyone goes through - email is chaotic, time consuming, generally ill organized, addictive and very poorly converted to tasks. As a result, unless you have a system, you just arent that productive with email (and in general at work).

This book goes on to give you a system for organizing your email and tasks at work. It details how to use outlook tasks to define your performance goals, define supporting projects for each of those goals and then define specific tasks that support those projects. Once done, you schedule those tasks on your calendar and voila - you are more productive. It advocates keeping your inbox at 0, and moving email to the tasks folder to be tracked, or to a reference system for later use. It strongly advocates that if you can do something in less than two minutes, just take care of it now. Over the long run this will pay off.

I've been using the system advocated all week. I have to say I'm more productive and I feel just more focused on the core things I need to do at work. It makes me really happy not to have 3000 pieces of badly categorized email in my inbox - rather I bounce at 0 everyday.Another subtle change is that I dont spend time looking at my inbox all day, waiting for the next mail - instead I tend to stare at my calendar and tasks and work through them. A positive reinforcement cycle sets in when I see the list of cool things I've done all week. My old boss took the class around this book - and had the same aha moment. I would strongly advise you to give this book a spin if you work in a corporate environment and use Outlook. It needs a little discipline to use, but the results are really good.

Shaykat

MS Web based RSS aggregator...

shaykatc — Thu, 17 Mar 2005 16:04:00 GMT

Just checked out the trial MS Web based aggregator at http://www.start.com/1/. Seems kind of neat and eliminates the need for me to run a client aggregator. Another cool spot I noticed is Microsoft Sandbox - a spot where early technologies are put up.

Shaykat

McCabes Cyclomatic Complexity

shaykatc — Wed, 16 Mar 2005 22:15:00 GMT

This is a cool concept that Steve discussed briefly today. The discussion was around how to do code coverage effectively, and Steve brought up the idea of Mccabes cyclomatic complexity. This is basically a stat that measures the complexity of a particular function. It measures this by checking the number of branches in code. A method with no branches has complexity of one, a method with 1 branch has complexity of 2 etc etc. Anyway tools can measure the complexity of particular functions. As it was discussed at our meeting, studies have been done charting bugs found in a function w.r.t its cyclomatic complexity and apparently the number of bugs spikes up hard after complexity hits 13. Pretty cool concept, fun to read about. Please note the author expresses no expertise in this area, but just wanted to share a neat new idea/discussion with the general community.

Shaykat

February Community Technology Preview is out!

shaykatc — Thu, 03 Mar 2005 21:15:00 GMT

The Feb CTP just got released today. Its the Express SKU. This is a build from a source branch that we give to internal partner teams, so it should be pretty good quality. You can find it here. Again, this is express so it should be a quick install and download.

Shaykat

Recruiting in C# land

shaykatc — Wed, 02 Mar 2005 23:01:00 GMT

I saw Erics post on recruiting in Movie Maker and felt the need to blog about our efforts in C# to recruit good people. We take this very seriously - good teams are an important ingredient in the making of good products. Our management prioritize recruiting very highly too and have recently gone all out in an internal campaign to get people interested in coming to C#. So I was sitting around one day, sipping my decaf latte on yet another rainy day in Redmond, when I decided to take my afternoon walk around the corridors. And blammo I start noting that our team has put up recruiting posters in very high visibility areas - entrance to the cafeteria, entrance to the elevators etc. The first poster I see is the one below..not bad I thought.

A couple of weeks later, I exit from the elevator and blammo, I see the post below. I loved it! Creative, geeky - probably instantly appealing to a code focused sort of person who would do well in C# land. Heck, I'd almost slap this on a tshirt and wear it everyday! Look at that code!

Anyway, if you are interested in C# jobs, check out

http://msdn.microsoft.com/vcsharp/jobs

We have both Dev and Test jobs. We will see all the resumes submitted. Think sharp. C# (in my best Bond imitation).

Shaykat

Gmail invites - perhaps time to blog a question

shaykatc — Tue, 01 Mar 2005 23:16:00 GMT

So I use gmail. Its a nice email service - I like the autocomplete on address feature, but still not to sure about the sorting and the multiple steps to trash messages. Plus I just read an article on Gmail at http://www.google-watch.org/gmail.html which was thought provoking at the very least on email features. But I digress.

What I just noticed is that I have 50 invites to Google. I havent raided a Beta2 bug, but I'm assuming because they are expanding the service out. Anyone else notice an uptick in the number of invites? I'm curious if this is algorithmically allocated (more for people who email more, or sign up people who email a lot...I could go on) or just somethng as boring as Google spent 1 billion dollars on new hardware and are expanding the service.

Shaykat

Customer question and a new release

shaykatc — Tue, 01 Mar 2005 23:07:00 GMT

First off - the new release. Vs7.0 SP1 is out. This is the SP for VS2002. It bundles a ton of QFE's into it, plus security fixes. Man, we are happy to see this go. The security fixes on our end were difficult for us to do and its great to see this go out to customers after so long. The download is here. Im still waiting for the release notes to come out so I can point out some of the more interesting fixes we took.

The second is a customer question from an earlier blog post. RonO asked:

Do you plan to address the availability of Beta2 via an ordering process (a la http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/vs2005/get/order/default.aspx)? This wasn't in place untill well after Beta1 was released and once it was it took a while to actually get the order delivered. It would be nice to see this available from the start of Beta2.

We will have an ordering process for Beta2 kits to the public - it will be linked off of http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/vs2005/. It should go live almost immediately as Beta2 is released. However MSDN subscribers will get the chance to download the Beta2 immediately as it goes live (we just prop the bits on the server). The kits take a little longer to get as we have to prepare them (burn the cd, package them etc). It would be a good idea to sign up for the MSDN subscription if you want to get your hands on the Beta2 bits immediately.

Debugging .NET apps on Windows 98

shaykatc — Tue, 15 Feb 2005 19:39:00 GMT

I was sick all of last week and am still recovering from the flu. My blogging slacked off a bit, but now back at work I slowly feel the need to communicate about our bugs and status again.

Today we were faced with an interesting bug. Its little known but the runtime runs on Windows 98/98 SE/98 ME. As a result, we provide remote debugging support to this platform. We dont allow VS to run on this as the shell isnt supported in Windows 98 - this was a decision we made a while ago.

Now keeping this around is a cost on us and we've debated the old keep vs. cut decision around this many times.

How do you feel about this support? Dont care? Is there anyone who runs a larg number of apps on Win98 and debugs it using vs?

Shoot me some mail...

Shaykat

The hoops we ask people to jump through for ask mode...

shaykatc — Fri, 28 Jan 2005 19:04:00 GMT

Next week, every bug that C# checks in to Whidbey Beta2 will have to be approved by our triage team. To simplify this process a little, we ask teams to come to us with a template of information already filled out about the bug. This makes discussion really fast. Whats in the template (hint...Doom!)...

Customer Problem. We ask the dev to describe what the specific user scenario the customer runs into. This is to stop the inevitable explanation "We need to fix our CList data structure because you can have an infinite recursion". Statements like this are met with arched eyebrows and steely eyes that state "so what...does this affect the customer somehow". This is thus filled out with something like- "the customer loads his project, types blah de blah, opens class view, and his nodes are missing". This description is very important as it allows us to make decisions whether this is a mainline scenario, or something less common and hence puntable.

Workarounds. Are there any workarounds to this problem? If there are, maybe some might be acceptable to the user. If there arent, it makes the problem a little more stark.

Regression. Is this a regression from Everett? If we break a users experience from Everett, it might be an adoption blocker and hence something we need to fix.

Affected Dll’s. A list of the dll’s affected by this fix. This is done mostly to assess the scope of the fix.

Dependencies. A list of all teams affected by this change. Often we need to make sure we contact these guys to see if they are ok with this change.

Code Review. We require one before checkin.

Test Signoff. We require QA to signoff on the fix before checkin.

Why wasnt this found earlier. We ask this to cover up test holes we might have.

Security Impact. To make sure there isnt a security downside to the checkin.

UX Impact. UX is user experience, but this is to make sure we can alert our document guys, designers and localizers of any string changes, dialog changes etc.

Cost. How many days of work is this for Dev, QA, PM?

Risk. Is this a risky change?

Performance impact. Is there any performance impact for this fix?

Shaykat

C# Languae chat in one hour...

shaykatc — Thu, 27 Jan 2005 19:55:00 GMT

Got questions about the language design? The language team will be on their keyboards at 1pm Pacific today for a chat with customers. You can join the fun at: http://msdn.microsoft.com/chats/chatroom.aspx

Ideal C# talks

shaykatc — Wed, 26 Jan 2005 20:42:00 GMT

We were talking about talks at conferences today, and it got me wondering...what talks would you like to have our team present on at a conference? Or maybe just certain topics?

We used to approach this from a team perspective - learn about the compiler!, learn about the IDE! heres a 1 hour tour of the debugger! I'm wondering if there are specific talks you wish you would rather see from us? Or ways to present information?

Shaykat

The glass is also half full...

shaykatc — Tue, 25 Jan 2005 03:07:00 GMT

I've posted recently about bugs we havent been fixing. I fear this tends to put a negative touch on the great job our team is doing in fixing other, more important bugs. Our triage team sat down today and looked at fix rates over the last year, and our fix rate for bugs last week matched one of our top 3 weeks last year! Thats pretty phenomenal!

Mike Sampson does a pretty good job of describing our shutdown schedule here: http://weblogs.asp.net/misampso/archive/2005/01/19/356194.aspx. As we shutdown into tell and ask mode for Beta2, we use a written bar to judge every bug that we fix. Our bar is kind of lower than the one I'm going to chat about - but eventually we want to be fixing only the following sorts of bugs. One other important thing - the list below is a guideline. If I had a nickel for every time someone has brought a bug, that we needed to fix but wasnt on this list...I would be sipping fruity drinks on a very nice beach in Hawaii right now. Anyway, here goes -

a. Crashes and hangs. Pretty obviously, its no fun if the product comes crashing down just as you are doing a sweet refactoring. In past product cycles, we also get feedback from Beta release users of the most common crashes reported by Watson, and we fix them.

b. Security issues. If evil hacker dude, script kiddy etc...can easily take your machine over, we will fix it.

c. Bugs in major customer scenarios. If refactoring is a bad experience or Enc has bug that just drives you nuts - we'll fix it. Its a sort of multiplier effect almost - a small innocuous bug in a scenario used one grillion times ranks as high as a major bug that could be run into not very often.

d. QA blockers. If our tester guys - our last line of defense against a paltry product - cant run tests because of a bug, we would take it.

e. Performance blockers. If this bug blocks your debugger from launching an app fast, or other scenarios (soon to be blogged about), yeah we would fix that.

f. Regressions from VS2003 and VS2002. Past product usage sets expectations and we dont want to break that experience (unless planned, such as keybinding changes).

g. Fixes we want feedback on. We love Ladybug bugs and we would take fixes that we want you our customer to tell us - hey thats cool, or hey what were you smoking?

In case you're wondering, I havent put in any specific bugs - I shy from that now in case we get a regression, or the checkin isnt right. Suffice to say, we are fixing a bunch of bugs too, so please keep your Ladybug feedback rolling in!

Shaykat