venkatna's (Venkat Narayanan's) WebLog : Windows Live

Speeding up Web 2.0 applications

venkatna — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 23:35:35 GMT

My experience with web 2.0 applications is limited to Live.com homepage (www.live.com) and Start.com. In my experience, start.com was generally faster than live.com. There are various reasons for this, but one of the main ones is the amount of JavaScript code we download. Start.com was a much smaller site compared to live.com. We also have some other cookie related features in live.com that slow it down a little bit.

The first release of live.com was very slow. We improved it a whole lot by doing more processing on the server and actually rendering the basic blocks as html, instead of rendering everything using JS on the client side.

I read a paper today from Microsoft Research - Code Splitting for Network Bound Web 2.0 Applications that contains a lot of great information about splitting JS files so that we download only what we need. We applied some of those principles on live.com, but didn't nearly do enough. Chalk it up to experience, I guess :). Anyway, the point of this post is to point people to this paper. It is well worth a read, and we could all benefit from faster web applications.

- Venkat

Windows Live starting to look better and better

venkatna — Fri, 10 Aug 2007 03:42:45 GMT

This is exciting. Windows Live, for a long time has been confusing for a lot of people. Sites did not look the same and they did not work well with one another. That seems to be changing now. More and more services seem like they were built together. And this morning Microsoft released two new Windows Live Services.

The first one, http://home.live.com is exactly what it sounds like. A central jumping off point for everything Windows Live. The page looks cool and seems to be quick. However, it seems to lack some basic functionality. If you have used the Live.com personalized homepage, you might remember home.live.com used to take you there. The personalized page still exists and as far as i know will continue to exist (I work on it, kinda :)). You can also access the personalized page at http://my.live.com.

The second service, Windows Live SkyDrive, is cool. I really like the name. I love the concept. I have two asks though. We only get 500 MB, that should really be higher. I would also like to see tighter integration with Foldershare. That would make this a killer service. [Note: I don't work with this team, and do not know what future plans are.]

We have also recently released new versions of WL Writer, WL Messenger, and WL Mail. And as Satya Nadella said in an interview recently, we are working on a new release of Search (and i am directly working on this :) ). I see fun things happening around Windows Live this year.

- Venkat

Live.com Growing up

venkatna — Sun, 03 Dec 2006 04:30:00 GMT

The product i work on, Live.com, is growing up. We now have a product tour. The product tour has some pretty, um, interesting videos. Here's one. I am not sure what to make of the marketing videos though. I do like the product tour. It makes is easy for people to understand what do with their page.

Finally, i can come out of a blogging coma!

venkatna — Fri, 15 Sep 2006 19:38:00 GMT

We have finally shipped our V1 product. Live.com is officially out of beta. You can find more details at our team blog. Over the last couple of months, our focus has been on improving the quality of the site, improving the performance, and improving our third party gadget support. We still have quite a ways to go in all three areas. Performance, for one, can definitely be improved.

So far, the reviews have been generally positive, but i am interested in what you think. What do you like, and more importantly, not like about the site?

Going forward, i will spend more time blogging about how we built the site, what performance we did and general architecture discussions about building large scale, scalable, ajax web sites.

Thanks,
- Venkat

A Very good list of web 2.0 companies

venkatna — Sun, 02 Jul 2006 05:06:00 GMT

I have been meaning to blog this for a while - I found an exhaustive list of web 2.0 companies a while back, but never got around to linking to it. In time for the long weekend, enjoy.

I have been going through all the companies on this list, but it takes a lot of time. :)

- Venkat

Fixed a IE hang bug, and folders

venkatna — Fri, 26 May 2006 21:15:00 GMT

We had a new release yesterday where we fixed some major performance issues. We also fixed a bug with IE. We were using quite a few transparent .PNG files on the page. In IE6, this is rendered using an ActiveX object. For some reason, (mostly timing issues) the page would crash on IE6. We have fixed this by removing all of the transparent .png files and replacing them with transparent .gif files.

We also introduced some new features. We have improved the RSS feed fetch and render performance. If you had a number of RSS feeds on your page, the browser used to lock up for a little bit because we were doing a lot of work trying to parse the xml. We have now improved this by fetching JSON back instead of XML.

We also introduced the ability to create folders in My stuff. You can now organize your feeds better. You can also rename your feeds and gadgets from My Stuff. You can also drag a module from one page to another, by dropping the module on the page title.

The search team has introduced a couple of new features as well. You can now get Instant answers for News (Iraq, George Bush) and Phonebook entries (pizza seattle).

Thanks,
- Venkat

New updates to Live.com

venkatna — Fri, 05 May 2006 05:37:00 GMT

We just released some new updates to Live.com. Sanaz just posted about the changes in our team blog. We have done some work to improve performance. One of the things Sanaz hasn't mentioned is compression. We have turned on compression which improves page load. We have also made changes to our caching strategy to make sure we download only the files we need. We are slowly getting better at performance, but we are not close to where we want to be.

We hope to keep iterating and improving the site. We hope you stick with us and see those changes.

- Venkat

some stats on Live.com

venkatna — Wed, 12 Apr 2006 02:28:00 GMT

Live.com has been around for a little bit now. A lot of people have created gadgets for the site. You can see a list of them at MicrosoftGadgets. As of today, there are 247 gadgets available. I just wanted to publicize some of the stats we have. Mike, a PM on our team ran some queries to get these stats for the team. Mike's blog, unfortunately, does not have anything yet. He promises he will start posting soon. Here's a prod. :)

Here are the top 10 third party gadgets on the Live.com page:

http://gadgets.donavon.net/gadgets/EarthObservatory.xml
http://gadgets.donavon.net/gadgets/LiveClock.xml
http://www.tud.ttu.ee/~t990896/gadgets/converter/converter.xml
http://gadgets.donavon.net/gadgets/googlesearch.xml
http://www.produitsbcm.com/Gadgets/GamerTag.xml
http://www.geocities.com/mittensdusty/WLF.xml
http://gadgets.donavon.net/Gadgets/WordOfTheDay.xml
http://www.geocities.com/mittensdusty/Pacman.xml
http://ext.weatherbug.com/LiveGadget/weatherbug/weatherbuglive2.xml
http://www.blogthevote.net/gadgets/ve.xml

Here are the top 10 Live.com gadgets on the page:

Mail
Weather Forecasts
Safety Center
Windows Live Gallery
Gadget Gallery
Ticking Clock
Search:
Horoscopes
Stock Quotes

- Venkat

Back from vacation

venkatna — Tue, 11 Apr 2006 04:08:00 GMT

I had taken my paternity break recently and spent a lot of quality time with my daughter. It was a little difficult to come back to work, but i think i am finally back in the thick of things. I apologize for not updating my blog in the meantime, but i think you can understand.

I have also been rethinking what i want to concentrate on in this blog. I will try to follow the following "rules" on this blog.

- I will not post something where i just link to somebody, unless i am commenting on what they are talking about.
- I will try to post a little bit more. Where possible, i will try to post original content.
- I will post about Live.com and gadgets. I will concentrate my efforts here.
- I will post about testing and automation of Live.com and gadgets.
- I will post about testing in an agile environment.
- Any general fun stories about Live.com :)

We will see how this goes.

In the meantime, we have shipped a couple of releases on Live.com. A major release went out on 3/8, which destabilized the site quite a bit. We have had some more releases since then, basically stabilizing the site and improving performance. I need to start making sure we do not destabilize the site everytime we have a major release. Search has also shipped their new UI on Live.com.

- Venkat

Best time in a product cycle

venkatna — Sun, 26 Feb 2006 07:16:00 GMT

We are getting pretty close to releasing another version of Live.com. I think this is about the best time in a product release. Everybody is working late and things are coming together nicely. You can actually start to see all the disparate features that people have been working on, come together. As the tester on the team, i get to make sure that these features dont break each other. It is a very nice feeling when you look up at 1 AM on a Friday night and see your team still there. One of the reasons i love working on the web is that release cycles are usually very short. So we have this situation pretty often.

We have some pretty nice features going out with this release and i sure do hope you guys like it as much as i have enjoyed working on them. Keep watching the Live.com blog for more details on the release.

- Venkat

Updates to the live.com page

venkatna — Mon, 30 Jan 2006 03:59:00 GMT

We made some updates to the Live.com page late Friday. We are working on a much larger set of items, but we felt we could not hold this one off until our release. There are two main fixes, as far as i am concerned.

The first fix is a UI change, which makes the page a lot more appealing. We now show images in an RSS feed inline. If there are multiple images in the feed, we cycle through them and point to the correct headline as we change the image. As far as i know, this works on all browsers we support (IE6, IE7, FF 1.0, 1.5 and Opera 9 Preview). There is a small UI issue with Opera 9, but that is not very visible.

The second fix is not visible to the user, but probably will have more impact. We had a lot of memory leaks in our RSS Reader code. We have now fixed all of it. I think this is probably the most important change we have done since our original release. We realize we still have some memory leaks in our other gadgets, but this gets rid of most problems. What this means to users is that the page can be left open longer and we will not drain PC resources. This should also make the page feel more responsive and faster.

You can find more details in our team space at MSN Spaces. There have been some requests to turn off this feature if necessary. I think that would make a good setting as well. We will see if we can do that.

- Venkat