Theil's WebLog

Test post from NewsGator

Theil — Tue, 15 Jun 2004 05:37:00 GMT

NewsGator looks to be really great. Combining my blog-reading with Outlook that I use 90% of the time anyway is an obvious winner, now if it would only support posting to multiple blogs..

Soma joins the IN-crowd

Theil — Fri, 28 May 2004 16:52:00 GMT

Let me take a minute to introduce myself. My name is Somasegar and I run the Developer Division at Microsoft.

Awesome - my manager's manager's manager's boss is Blogging too - I must be doing something right. [Via Somasegar's WebLog]

This is posted from w.bloggar btw. since I got pinged by Dare of RSS Bandit fame who made me feel guilty for highlighting other RSS Readers. I love the Bandit, but I think I need to get used to w.bloggar - I am back to remembering to write HTML-tags in the middle of sentences.

Update: Well the inevitable happened - I submitted some HTML that messed up the entire page! Turned out to be BlockQuote tags that somehow didn't digest well on my page - but I think I am better off with an editor that is simpler but lets me focus on content. I'm going to try a couple more times though, so watch out.

Cool stuff of the moment

Theil — Fri, 28 May 2004 03:56:00 GMT

Some programs get me as excited as a 4-year old who just discovered how fun running with your boots stuffed with mud is!

MaxiVista - Dual Monitor Software is one of those - everybody within shouting distance of my office (and a few I ran out and caught up with in the hallway) got dragged in to see me use the screen of my build-machine as an extra monitor for my laptop - NO WIRES - dig that !

Another tool I picked up after a reference in a blog I've now forgotten - but thanks - is Lookout for Outlook. It indexes your entire mailbox, including personal folders and then allows you to do Google-like searching across it all.

Finally I asked in an earlier post if anybody could point me to some good tools for posting to my blog and thanks to everybody for the responses. I am now using Sauce Reader as my main rss aggregator - it does pretty much what Sharp Reader and RSS Bandit does - but is does a great job of posting to my blog directly from an entry I'm reading. It is still a bit bug-ridden, but I think the advantages outway the occasional breakdowns.

One thing that Sauce Reader didn't give me was the "Blog This" button in Internet Explorer, but thanks to another feedback I am now writing this entry using BlogJet. As you can hopefully see BlogJet also supports uploading images via ftp for inclusion in posts. It has a nice simple interface and an editor with most of the features I feel I need.

That's the cool stuff I've come across recently, most of it I wouldn't have known existed if I hadn't read blog-posts.

The little virus that couldn't

Theil — Thu, 27 May 2004 14:58:00 GMT

Gotta love this : Scott Hanselman's Weblog - A Poor Man's Computer Virus

Ram on SOA Challenges, Entity Aggregation

Theil — Wed, 26 May 2004 04:28:00 GMT

One of the key tenets of MBF is to be able to support building systems based on a Service Oriented Architecture. Ram in his RunOfTheMillBlog covers approaches and challenges in supporting SOA with todays tools and systems as well as looking forward. He links to his MSDN article on the topic : .NET Architecture Center Home: SOA Challenges: Entity Aggregation (Building Distributed Applications) which is part of PAG's Integration Patterns.

This is all very interesting reading. The goal is that MBF will give Enterprise Architects much better tools to solve some of the difficult challenges in implementing a SOA based architecture. Actually MBF will introduce something that could be referred to as "Entity Decomposition" rather than Entity Aggregation to give one common view of entities with varying subsystem representation, we should have more on that later I hope.

Jakob Nielsen - Extreme Makeover

Theil — Mon, 24 May 2004 20:37:00 GMT

The UI-Guru Jakob Nielsen, who has preached simplicity and content over design for decades and been a shining light for sideburn-lovers around the world for just as long, gets a taste of his own medicine when five designers (think "Fab Five") takes his famous alert-box to the cleaners reports Boing Boing : Design critique of Jakob Nielsen. It's a fun story and an interesting twist on the never ending debate over what really defines useability.

You can read the article and see the resulting design changes at the DesignByFire site. Note that as a cruel plot by fate, your browser runs across two errors in the HTML when loading the article via the direct link, so maybe the Grand-Old Man of web design gets the last laugh.

I have to say though that I agree that he probably should move on to more challenging and up-to-date design advice than preaching the old "Use underline only for links" !

Objectspaces, WinFS and MBF all in Longhorn

Theil — Mon, 24 May 2004 07:13:00 GMT

I've been watching - and reading - the recent debate over the announcement to postpone the launch of Objectspaces to Longhorn by aligning it with WinFS.

Barry Gervin has a report from TechEd on this issue that ties together this decision with MBF also being moved to the Longhorn timeframe. I think it makes sense to make every effort possible to make sure that when we [MSFT] decide to put out a new data-access API, we can say that we have done everything possible to make sure that it is aligned across all layers that will build on it, and that it will provide a stable programming model for many years forward.

I don't think it is prudent to dismiss WinFS as "Just a Filesystem" that does not have anything to do with data-storage. It represents a paradigm shift in terms of connecting structured and unstructured storage, database and filesystem, and provides an object-relational model for data access - That, combined with the need to support the requirements for data access that ObjectSpaces and MBF bring to the marriage will help make WinFS suited to be the data-access platform for the future. For MBF this partnership will surely mean that we can now rely on a strong underlying persistance platform that will also be the data-storage platform of choice for Longhorn generation apps.

Cleaning up - Cool tool

Theil — Mon, 24 May 2004 04:34:00 GMT

While trying to find a good post-tool for my blog (if anybody knows a tool that will post to a .Text blog like this, let me know ! I am looking for something like the "Blog this" button from blogger.) I stumbled over a post on Scott Watermasysks blog about Spacemonger which is a cool, albeit kind of ugly, tool that will index your harddrive graphically ordering folders and files by size. This makes it easy to focus your housekeeping on that big Longhorn build you placed somewhere and then forgot - a personal example that recovered a nice 2 gigs for me !

Off to a slow start

Theil — Wed, 19 May 2004 06:00:00 GMT

So the crux of bloggin' is to be able to blog frequently about what's on your mind when it's still there for you to blog about.

That means that I need to increase my frequency a bit since it has taken me 3 months to get around to creating this, the first post in my blog. Having spent some time reading other people's blog's I've found that the frequency with which they are updated is almost as important as the content of the posts. Maybe it's just me taking voyeuristic pleasure in reading tidbits about other peoples life - work as well as private, but I think it has to do with how the blog becomes a storyline in itself - The best blogs evolve over time, they capture like a sort of real-time book - and I think that's the real difference in a blog as opposed to the "ordinary" website with news-updates.

So, now that the blog is officially opened - what storyline is this blog going to tell ?

It's going to be mostly about my work at Microsoft and certainly about the exiting work we are doing on MBF. I'm happy to see that a few of my colleagues have already started bloggin' about MBF so I can take the easy way out and point you to Tim Brookins, Dan's and Kevin's blogs (see the Link section), but I will try to add to that by focusing on the work we are doing in my team to provide framework and runtime support for UI and application patterns in MBF.

To get you started, a quick introduction to MBF is available in this deck from PDC03. You should note however that since then we have decided to release MBF as part of the Orcas Visual Studio release instead of the 2-phase release that this presentation mentions, with a release in Whidbey and another in Orcas. Tim Brookins talks about this decision and includes some links to comments in this entry.

I realize that maybe the first entry should have been an introduction of myself - but hey - isn't this what bloggin is about - I just wasn't on my mind when I wrote this, so the short intro for now will be that my name is Jesper Theil Hansen and I am managing the "MBF Client & Patterns" team (Pending a team name change) in Copenhagen, Denmark. Welcome here.