Sue Loh's blog : Misc. Fun

Windows Embedded Challenge ROCKS!

sloh — Sun, 19 Jun 2005 06:54:00 GMT

I know I said I'd be blogging on the ce_base team blog now, but I figured my personal blog is a better place for this one as it's more personal in nature. I just finished two days of serving as a judge for the Windows Embedded Student Challenge. I had a most wonderful time. The quality of the work, the innovation, and the energy of the students were simply amazing. What a diversity of projects from a diverse cross-section of the world! How energizing to see people take the work I do and build such impressive systems on top of it! The only disappointing part of the competition was that I didn't have a chance to see all 30 projects.

I also feel somewhat emotional about the event because it was heartbreaking to give some of these teams such disappointments. Everyone has worked so hard and cares so much. So to those teams out there who might read this, I want to say that just because you weren't chosen doesn't mean we didn't like your projects, or think that they could become successful products. In some cases we had to eliminate teams because their projects just weren't 100% ready, or because we felt they didn't adequately describe important aspects of their project during their presentation. It was clear in many cases that the teams intended to continue working on their projects, in an attempt to build a real commercial product. I would encourage you all to continue following the dream. If you want more feedback please do ask for it; we would be happy to help you understand what parts of the project were weak and how to improve on them for the future.

I loved meeting everyone. Thank you for your hard work, and for sharing it with us. I wish you all the best of luck, and hope to see you again! (Maybe next year?) Stay in touch, and I will see you online. ;-)

Sue

Windows CE Base Team Blog

sloh — Tue, 07 Jun 2005 03:27:00 GMT

We just created a new team blog, the CE base team blog, to cover kernel & file system issues.

http://blogs.msdn.com/ce_base/

I'm going to start posting there instead of here. I probably won't have a lot of side-posts on this blog; I don't really have the energy for lots of off-topic personal stuff. So if you are subscribed to this blog, you may want to switch over to that one. We're hoping that the new blog will get more of our team involved in posting, and provide a more consistent stream of information (as I tend to write in bursts).

Don't worry, I still have a list of things I want to write up "when I get the chance." See you there,

Sue

On the lighter side

sloh — Thu, 24 Mar 2005 18:44:00 GMT

It is actually pretty funny to read this page in gizoogle: http://sites.gizoogle.com/?url=http://blogs.msdn.com/sloh/

It's really just an updated version of "jive," but it has been a while since I played with those filters so it's fun again. :-)

Im tha Double O G. and I'm not straight trippin' any raps. Yeay cuz its a pimp thang!

DevCon 2005

sloh — Wed, 16 Mar 2005 18:46:00 GMT

Yeay! I'm going to this year's DevCon, which covers both Mobile and Embedded this year (instead of just Embedded as I've gone to in years past). Should be a hoot. I'm signed up as plain staff, not giving any talks (so far!), so I'll be working the booth, Ask the Experts, etc. For more info on DevCon see http://www.medc2005.com/.

Sue

Thread Lab materials are posted for EDC participants

sloh — Tue, 06 Jul 2004 16:59:00 GMT

They've finally posted my thread lab handouts and code up on www.edccontent.com. So if you went to DevCon and need that material, you can get it now. The handout contains everything I talked about in my hands-off lab, but also has some details I didn't, mostly samples of other threads (explorer.exe, cmd.exe) interfering with program behavior. Also check out the explanation of how to recognize data loss in section 5.

If you didn't attend EDC and don't have access to the materials, I don't think I am supposed to give them out. But I will be working to make them generally available one way or another -- hopefully to integrate them into Platform Builder help.

Sue

I survived!

sloh — Fri, 02 Jul 2004 21:49:00 GMT

Hooray, I survived DevCon! The kernel talk and perf talk were ready to go by Monday, and after many short nights last week and this week, my lab was ready “enough” by Wednesday morning. The handouts are missing some screenshots and a lot of polish. The program I demo'd with was not quite as complete as I had hoped. But overall I think the content was good.

Sounds like I need to work on my presentation skills :-( so my apologies to any attendees who went to my talks. Even though I know the material I guess I still get too nervous speaking about it. The kernel talk was really too much for one session; it should have been a 100-level basics talk plus a 200- or 300- level OAL & driver development talk. I goofed my lab and ran 15 minutes beyond time, because I had the wrong end time in mind, and a lot of material to cover. I should have skipped going over how I built my image, and just dived right into the meat of things.

Ahh well. Hopefully someone benefited. I'll be cleaning up my lab materials & demo code shortly, and hope to get it all into our SDK documentation or something. I'm pretty excited about my lab handouts because I think they contain a lot of information people haven't easily found on their own before.

Sue

Another DevCon talk

sloh — Tue, 18 May 2004 01:59:00 GMT

Looks like I'll also be giving the “Inside the Windows CE Kernel” talk at DevCon. It means a little bit of studying for me but it shouldn't be a disaster. It's a lot of content for an hour though.

I think my Hands-On Lab with CeLog/Kernel Tracker was turned into a Hands-Off Lab. Which is too bad, so many people don't use our tools because they're intimidated, when it's actually very easy. I would like to develop the content in a way that it can be converted to a hands-on lab anyway, say with a typical CEPC, so that people could go through it separately on their own time.

Get excited about DevCon! I am!

Sue

See you at DevCon!

sloh — Tue, 11 May 2004 02:43:00 GMT

Sorry I haven't been posting any content. Mainly I expect content to come out of newsgroup interaction and general customer questions, and I have been a slacker about being on the newsgroups. Too many high-priority things going on right now.

I'll be giving a talk (“Tools and Techniques for Investigating Performance Problems on Windows CE-based Devices“) and a hands-on lab (”Tools and Methods for Examining Thread Behavior in Windows CE”) at the Windows Embedded DevCon in June. So this will be your chance to pick my brain for how to use our profiling and threading tools. Suggestions and questions about my talks are more than welcome, they're encouraged!

You can find abstracts for these and all the other DevCon content at: http://www.windowsembeddeddevcon.com/tech_content.asp

[Yikes, why did I make the titles so long?]

Sue

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

Get help on the Windows CE Newsgroups!

sloh — Mon, 26 Apr 2004 02:21:00 GMT

The newsgroups are my favorite way to help you with your problems; if you have a problem you're looking for help with, I'd prefer you post your question on a newsgroup and then point me to it. That way you have a chance at getting help from other people, and other people who have the same problem can find your discussion and read it.

Know how to search old posts -- I use http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&group=microsoft.public.windowsce and click the “search only in microsoft.public.windowsce.*“.

Newsgroups I try to read regularly are:

Sue

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

Hello, world! ... no really, hello.

sloh — Mon, 26 Apr 2004 01:51:00 GMT

So I've decided to try my hand at blogging. Why?

First, it gives me a central place to put information, where hopefully you and I always find it and refer to it. I do my best to participate in the Microsoft public newsgroups, and this way I can post information once and always refer back to it. Also I can post information that wasn't explicitly requested, in hopes it can help you discover new things.

Second, it gives you another way to find me, ask questions, suggest new content, complain, make fun of me, etc.

And it's a less structured way to express myself, show you that developers at Microsoft are human beings too :-), and demonstrate that I not only care about the products I work on, I care about the people who use them.

So let's see how this goes. I'm not always the most active or responsive person in our community; I actually have to write code now and then so sometimes I'm heads-down on a project. Or more likely, context-switching between a bunch of things at once. But I'll try to fit in some quality time on the side.

Sue

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.