Stephen Fisher : Random Drivel

The silver clock

stfisher — Mon, 06 Dec 2004 21:48:00 GMT

My 5-year anniversary just came and went (I would have completely forgotten except for the nifty swag) on November 22nd. I now own one of those groovy silver clocks with multiple time-zones and my name and anniversary engraved across the front.

It's pretty common in MS to send out anniversary emails that detail the employee count, major product releases, and for old geezers, the non-split stock price for the starting year. In my case, I was just excited to be working on cool technology, so I didn't pay attention to the rest. I do remember running NT4 and after a long year of nag-mails from execs, I begrudgingly upgraded my dev box to a Win2000 beta. I can certainly admit that I had no good reason to avoid the upgrade except I didn't want to deal with even the slightest UX tweaks. At least I had empathy for consumers :)

Not much to say yet about my CLR security features - waiting for Whidbey Beta-2 so I can speak up.

In the meantime, please offer patronage to Shawn [CLR Security Tester] for his amazing security blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/shawnfa

How time flies... and returns like Mordecai

stfisher — Thu, 19 Aug 2004 20:59:00 GMT

You'll have to pardon me for falling off the planet for the last (almost a year). No, I wasn't hit by a bus, although it was a wild ride!

The last time I posted, we [the TabletPC Avalon Platform team] were about to commit some substantive changes to the TabletPC platform object model for Longhorn/Avalon. To be frank, the 'commitment' was fairly involved and my blogging time dissipated almost immediately. After those changes took effect, I went on paternity leave with my son, and helped out the TabletPC group in some new customer/community and development infrastructure areas. Over the last 6 months, I was fortunate enough to work with Philip Su (you might have noticed his momentous splash in the blog scene).

So, what's the big news that led to my emergence from hibernation? I'm quite excited to announce my new job [still at Microsoft] within the Common Language Runtime Security team - developing Whidbey and Longhorn features. I've only been here a couple weeks, so there's not much that I can say yet about upcoming work. However, for those of you wondering about life in the CLR team or questions for the security team - why not ask "the new guy"?

Other blogging folks in the CLR Security team include Shawn Farkas (current Tester), Greg Fee (past Developer), and Ivan Medvedev (past Tester).

To add a bit of parasitic spice to the mix, if you have any questions for Jim Hugunin (no blog quite yet) about dynamic languages, IronPython or joining Microsoft, I'd be happy to interupt him as he's sitting a few feet from me. <grin>

So this is a TabletPC Blog, eh?

stfisher — Mon, 17 Nov 2003 02:16:00 GMT

Boilerplate Welcome mat:

Welcome to my humble node on the internet...

My name is Stephen Fisher, and I'm a developer in the TabletPC team at Microsoft. Specifically, I'm part of the team which ships the TabletPC Platform SDK, including the digital ink recognizers, the digital ink API (including the Microsoft.Ink .NET namespace), and a set of developer samples.

Coincidentally, I just noticed some posts in a couple blogs requesting more involvement from the TabletPC product team for developers. Thanks for the interest. Traditionally, the product team has been very active on web-based message boards and in various newsgroups - some of us have even been known to sit in bed with their TabletPCs at 3am answering posts - the warm glow of the screen keeping spouses from too much r.e.m..

My main focus is on the technical end of the TabletPC (API development and engineering), but you'll find all manner of TabletPC related material and links on this blog. Please feel free to use the category links at left to filter my ramblings - I hope most posts are mildly useful (living in the shadow of Chris, ya' know), but my feelings won't be hurt if you don't sync to “Random Drivel“ after this post.

Boilerplate Personal Stuff

I've been at Microsoft nearly 5 years - the first three in the Speech technology group, and the last 2 in TabletPC.

In Speech, I worked on multi-modal speech interface research (MSR), shipped the Microsoft Speech API (5.0 and 5.1 SDKs), and built a speech-enabled Media Player plugin for Windows XP Plus! Pack. I wrote a great deal of the documentation on CFG support in the SAPI 5 SDK and have been active in both the Speech and TabletPC newsgroups (in case you have questions about Speech with SAPI ).

As far as business card-style job titles go, I was a Software Design Engineer in Test (QA and tools at Microsoft) while in Speech, and I'm currently a Software Design Engineer (software developer) in TabletPC. Bottom line is I eat, breath, and dream source code (well except when I'm critiquing directors or building with LEGO brick).

This blog will be primarily focused on TabletPC, with a leaning towards developer support. However, don't be surprised if I slip in the odd comment on speech support, .NET in general, or my other favorite topic - developing secure code. I'm a hacker at heart and my Outlook inbox is subscribed to about 30 distribution lists - over 1000 email a day filtered with custom Exchange rules - so I try to keep my typing fingers in all sorts of pies.