load of tosh : MS

Writing Solid Code

Tosh Meston — Tue, 28 Sep 2004 07:21:00 GMT

I've just finished reading Writing Solid Code, which it seems everybody at Microsoft has and recommends. I think one of my past dev leads bought each of us on the team a copy. The odd thing is that it's having immediate effect. Maybe that's not odd, but good. I'd finish a chapter and start immediately adding recommended practice to my home projects. Many of the practices are old having been ingrained by dev leads and peers stating them time and again in code reviews. It's clearly a part of the culture at MS. What I found interesting in the book was real world stories of the "old" days -- bugs that were found in Mac Excel due to poor coding practices. The other key takeaway of the book which I'd recommend to new hires or interns is the attitude that the author promotes of the developer being a tester first.

XP SP2 and .NET 1.1 SP1

Tosh Meston — Sun, 05 Sep 2004 01:17:00 GMT

With all the articles and blog entries about these two recent service packs I was wondering if I would see anything interesting when I installed them on my laptop and home web server. The answer is no. Everything just works. My sites continue to chug along and my apps are just fine. I guess that doesn't make a good story.

Red Whittaker Visits Microsoft

Tosh Meston — Tue, 17 Aug 2004 06:13:00 GMT

Dr. William "Red" Whittaker of CMU visited the research room at Microsoft today to talk a bit about Sandstorm, the robotic Humvee, and the Grand Challenge. In robotics, there are of two schools of thought in making mobile robots. There's a top down approach, which is based on building the best maps of the terrain in relation to the robot's position. This implies the more computing power, the better. The more sensors, the better. At the other end, there's a more reactive model where the robot simply senses and reacts and knows nothing about the environment, except what it is currently in contact with. Red's team is decidedly in the former camp with Sandstorm using GPS, Radar, Lidar and Stereo-optical sensors to plan its movements. A friend of mine who attended CMU mentioned that Red as a professor seemed a very imposing and intimidating figure -- that "when you're in a room with Red, there's no question who is in control". I thought this was interesting given the philiosophy of robotics he's known for and had to see for myself. You know, it's kind of true...

A couple other notes: Red mentioned that Sandstorm was his 67th robot project. He also said it's amazing what his team accomplished given a few sponsors and a "children's crusade" of programmers. Too funny.

Good luck next year, Red Team.

New MSN Search

Tosh Meston — Thu, 01 Jul 2004 18:27:00 GMT

Sweet. MSN Search has a new release. Looks good too without all that clutter in my opinion. Searching for myself seems to produce the same results I would find on another site. Here's more info.

This comes my way via Engadget. They have a comparison of the experience against Google using Pocket IE.

Seattle Times -- Bill Gates as Chief Blogging Officer ???

Tosh Meston — Sun, 27 Jun 2004 23:23:00 GMT

Seattle Times has a piece indicating that BillG might start a weblog of his own. Wouldn't that be cool.

Return of the DHTML Dude

Tosh Meston — Sun, 20 Jun 2004 22:47:00 GMT

Hmm... the return of the DHTML dude is of interest to the Slashdot crowd.

Weird Afternoon at Microsoft

Tosh Meston — Fri, 18 Jun 2004 05:50:00 GMT

Weird afternoon at Microsoft today. My building sits between our conference center and a cafeteria and as I look down from my window I can see the pathway into the cafe. This afternoon I looked down and saw this woman that looked strikingly like Marilyn Monroe. Didn't think much of it as I was busy. Pretty soon a guy in a leather jacket, black hair and sunglasses came by and stood by Monroe. Hmm, I thought. This guy kind of looks like Bono. I wonder what is going on down there? Finally at just about six o'clock, Austin Powers shows up and starts chatting away. I can read the body language of a “yeah baby” all the way from my vantage point. At six all these people start streaming out of the conference center and into the cafe to be greeted by the odd mix of a dead movie star, a pop singer and an international man of mystery. Never did find out what was up. As I was getting my things together to go get a picture with Bono, they went inside.

Ray Kurzweil Visits Microsoft

Tosh Meston — Thu, 20 May 2004 23:16:00 GMT

Yesterday I ran over to the MS Research lecture room to hear Ray Kurzweil speak. I guess unsurprisingly the MS folks packed the room in, but I managed to find some standing room in the back. Ray's talk was on the exponential acceleration of technology's capability and its adoption and some of his ideas on what the future might be which echoed themes from his last book The Age of Spiritual Machines. Kurzweil also feels that our expertise in biotech will eventually allow us to modify our own biology to live forever. He mentioned that he has a new book coming out on the topic called something like “How do live forever if you live long enough”.

“Bioterrorists don't have to put their inventions through the FDA”

-- Kurzweil

Microsoft Bashing is so '99

Tosh Meston — Sun, 25 Apr 2004 01:17:00 GMT

John Topley has a nice piece about Microsoft and why he doesn't understand all the hatred towards it. Hear, hear!

All the MS bashing does get one down after a while, even though I'd say our skins are thicker than most. I am just one of the 55,000 trying to build the best software we can. It's sounds trite because you hear it a lot from people here, but it's true. My particular job is to build the best web mail client out there and I love it. I love hearing about how people use our stuff. I love walking down the hall and seeing people outside my group dogfooding our latest bits and hearing what they think. I love getting email from people I've never met who've taken time out of their day to tell me about a bug or something in the software that they think just isn't right, and I love making sure we record those bugs and design change requests (what we call DCRs) so we can get those fixes out in the next release.

I don't remember where I was going with this particular entry anymore. Have a read through John's blog entry.

The History of Entourage

Tosh Meston — Mon, 05 Apr 2004 05:51:00 GMT

Omar Shahine shares his experience building Entourage basically from scratch. I love reading little histories like this.

Don't Leave, Frans

Tosh Meston — Sun, 07 Dec 2003 19:48:00 GMT

So yesterday Frans Bouma posted his concern about weblogs.asp.net becoming less of a .NET community site and instead a pulpit for MS employees (as a result of all the GotDotNet bloggers moving here) and wondered if it's still appopriate to criticize Microsoft from this domain. He admitted that he's thinking of moving his blog someplace else. My feeling is that this is probably understandable, but perhaps an over-reaction. I work for MS as a dev, not in the developer division, but I am a real customer of .NET and Visual Studio. Even I can criticize. I try to do it in a positive way, since I am proud of the work we do. If I discover a workaround to some trouble I am having, I blog it here in the hope that it helps someone else, and it works. Take the 1029 page views on this article that I posted back in July. If I have a feature request or bug report, I know that if I post about it MS people are listening. So stay man, it's your blog, your ideas. Say want you want, tell the world, the .NET community and MS what you think.

Newsweek Interviews Bill

Tosh Meston — Tue, 18 Nov 2003 20:24:00 GMT

Here's an interview of Bill by Newsweek's Steven Levy. A little bit of Longhorn vision, a little bit on security, a little bit on charity.

End of the Internship for the Mentor

Tosh Meston — Mon, 18 Aug 2003 03:30:00 GMT

Microsoft, as you may know, has a great internship program. We expect a lot from our interns. They usually learn a lot while they're with us and we expect them to work hard and produce naturally. This time of year in Redmond, the days are getting shorter and the interns are leaving to go back to school and tell their friends about what work and life is like at MS. Hopefully, they learned a lot and lived up to expectations. Hopefully, they go away from the company having had a positive experience.

This was my fourth mentorship of an intern at MS (3 as a test mentor and first as a development mentor). So what did I learn?

I learned that management can take a lot of time. I learned to multi-task more efficiently if I expected to do my own dev work and always be available to answer questions. I learned to expect the whys and hows and have answers for them. I learned to be more of a hard-ass when it comes to design and schedule. I learned to work as a liaison for my intern and other teams in MS. I learned that it's over before you think it is.

If you're a college student interested in interning with us. You can apply here for next year. Good luck to you all.

If you're a MS employee and not sure if you want to take on the responsibility of mentoring an intern. Do it. You'll learn a lot too.

Microsoft Developer Tools Roadmap 2003-2005

Tosh Meston — Mon, 04 Aug 2003 04:45:00 GMT

Seems like many of you guys are already up to date on future Visual Studio releases. In case you are interested in reading more on Whidbey and Orcas, you can visit this article on MSDN.

Scoble on the browser as an application platform

Tosh Meston — Fri, 25 Jul 2003 04:45:00 GMT

Scoble blogs again about the browser not being an application platform and in the same entry plugs "Outlook Web Application". Man, it's Outlook Web Access, not Application! But that's ok...

I wonder if Bezos thinks the browser isn't a very good application platform.