Only Passionate People Win : Microsoft

Webcast: Live From Redmond - VB9, Building N-Tier Applications

youngjoo — Tue, 22 May 2007 02:52:00 GMT

My second webcast which was a part of the webcast series done by Visual Basic Team called "Live From Redmond" webcasts on Visual Studio "Orcas" was on building N-Tier application using Visual Studio "Orcas". I gave this webcast a couple of weeks ago and it wasn't until today that on-demand version became available. Sorry to those who have been waiting for the on-demand link and a copy of my slide.

During this webcast, I described new "Orcas" data features at high-level and built a simple multi-tiered application as a demonstration. Specific topics that I covered include:

Hierarchical Update Support in Typed Dataset

TableAdapterManager class and TableAdapterManager.UpdateAll() method

N-Tier Support in Typed Dataset

Dataset Designer support to make Typed Dataset N-Tier friendly
How to add custom validation logic to Typed Dataset and apply them through multiple tiers

How to create and consume basic WCF service

LINQ to Typed Dataset

You can watch this webcast on-demand by visiting following Microsoft Events page. Also, a link to my slide deck below.

Webcast: Live From Redmond - LINQ to SQL & O/R Designer Deep Dive

youngjoo — Fri, 04 May 2007 22:12:00 GMT

Visual Basic team is hosting a series of "Live From Redmond" webcasts on Visual Studio "Orcas" and I gave one on LINQ to SQL and the O/R Designer a couple of days ago. Thanks to all who tuned in.

I covered following topics in my webcast:

Mapping database objects to .NET objects via attributes
Using the O/R Designer to visually create mapping between database objects and .NET objects
Writing LINQ to SQL queries

Basic LINQ to SQL queries
Relationship navigation
Join / Group Join
Deferred Execution
Identity Mapping

Data binding with LINQ to SQL
Updating data via LINQ to SQL
Stored procedures

Using stored procedures to override default runtime Insert, Update and Deleve behavior
Using stored procedures to retrieve result-set mapped to existing types

You can watch this webcast on-demand by visiting following Microsoft Events page. Also, a link to my slide deck below.

It’s almost done…

youngjoo — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 12:18:55 GMT

Been 7 months since my latest post. Why? Orcas. It's been a great ride and I can't wait to tell you all the great features my team worked on. March CTP is finally out and Beta 1 is coming soon. My team is putting final touches to the last feature we have left. After it's done, it will be all about getting feedback from the community and improving the quality of the final product.

It's almost done… and I am back to blogging again.

See Soma in action in Ed Helms' on-scene report

youngjoo — Fri, 30 Jun 2006 23:55:00 GMT

I certainly did not exepct to see our Corporate VP to be on video like this and even show silly side of him. Video itself is not that interesting. But outtakes at the end made me laugh out loud. Glad I had my door shut in my office. :)

Ed Helms' on-scene report (from Microsoft College Careers site)

Technorati Tags: microsoft

Customers pay your salaries

youngjoo — Sat, 06 May 2006 00:05:00 GMT

Today I am full of ideas around community and customer. Here's my top 10 list of how you as a software engineer should view customers as.

Customers pay your salaries, not your CEO.
Customers never complain. They demand.
Customers are not stupid. They are smarter than you are most of times.
Customers do not hate YOU. They hate paying for something that does not help them.
Customers love your product more than you do.
Customers know your product better than you do.
Customers do not understand your jargon.
Customers know they have other options even though they complain about your company's monopoly (whether it's true or not).
Customers will listen only if you are honest with them.
Customers want working software not cool software.

Amen.

Tags: customers, software engineers

Microsoft Bloggers Directory List

youngjoo — Fri, 05 May 2006 23:54:00 GMT

BlakeHandler told me that he's keeping track of Microsoft Bloggers Directory List. Thanks Blake! Very useful and something we should definitely provide on our side. I often wonder how people find our team blog when I receive feedback from it.

Update: yag just alerted me of Microsoft Feeds Directory. Thanks yag!

Tags: microsoft, blog, feed, community

Yag moves on and why I believe our paths will cross again

youngjoo — Fri, 05 May 2006 22:16:00 GMT

Yag moves on. He used to be the Group Manager of Visual Studio Data team before the team got merged into Visual Basic product unit and became a part of Visual Studio Professional Data team. Although I only spent a couple of months in Visual Studio Data team and only had 1 face-to-face meeting with him, I learned a lot from him. You see, it really doesn't require multiple encounters to learn great stuff from a great person. You know it when you meet that kind of person and you naturally absorb great stuff from that person like a dry sponge. That's what happened when I met yag.

Well, I actually had two face-to-face "official" meetings with him. One was during my interview and one was after I joined VS Data team. I think I only spent abouut 30 min with him during my interview. But that 30 min definitely helped me decide to eventually accept the offer. I met great people during my interview process and yag just sealed it at the end. We mostly talked about my passion around Agile Development. The second "official" meeting was the 1-on-1 he scheduled with me. During that meeting, he showed his passion around community. We also shared some frustration about how community stuff was done. Oh, don't get me wrong. That frustration was from being too passionate about something. I guess "frustration" is the wrong word for that...

Now, why do I think our paths will cross again? It's because we share same passion, creating great software that customer really needs by being pragmatic (Agile + Community). If you ask me, I rather listen to the customer and provide solution that just works as soon as possible rather than worrying about hundreds of other political, process and architectural things (a.k.a. impediments). If you ask me, I rather sit with the customer during the project cycle than in my own office guessing what customer needs. If you ask me, I get more excited when I get a small "thank you" note from the customer I helped than when I receive a "job well done" message from my manager. And I believe that's where yag's passion lies also.

Best wishes to yag in his new and exciting role.

Tags: microsoft, agile development, community

Consolas Font Pack and how to customize font in Command Prompt

youngjoo — Fri, 05 May 2006 10:00:00 GMT

So far, there were only two fonts suitable for IDEs such as Visual Studio, Courier New and Lucida Console. There's a third choice now. Go grab Consolas Font Pack for Visual Studio 2005 now. You can see differences between three fonts from Glen Gordon's blog.

Installing the font pack will automatically change the default font for Visual Studio to Consolas. I also changed the font for Notepad, Notepad2 and command prompt. Changing the font for command prompt is a bit tricky. If you open the properties window from command prompt, you will only see Lucida Console and Raster Fonts as options. In order to make other fonts appear in the font selection, you will need to make a small registry hack.

* Disclaimer: Don't blame me if you mess up your system while making changes to registries. You should always backup your registry before making changes. *

Open up registry editor (regedit) and browse to the following.

\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Console\TrueTypeFont\

Then add a new REG_SZ (right-click -> New -> String Value) with following.

Name: 00
Data: Consolas

Or... you can copy below to a new .reg file and just double-click on it to merge the change into your registry automatically.

--------Cut Here (do not include this line) -----
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Console\TrueTypeFont]
"00"="Consolas"
--------Cut Here (do not include this line) -----

Once you are done, restart your system and go back to command prompt property window. You will then be able to select Consolas as a font. If you would like to add another font, just create a new REG_SZ key with extra 0 for the name (000, 0000, 00000, etc).

Frankly, I am not sure whether I like Consolas better than Lucida Console. I guess I will give it a try for a while and see.

We listen, really...

youngjoo — Fri, 28 Apr 2006 11:13:00 GMT

Thought it might be helpful to list out ways you can vent if you are mad about our products. :)

Product Feedback Center: http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/ProductFeedback/
All bugs or suggestions you enter automatically get entered into our internal bug database. Each team has bug triage sessions at least once a week and these bugs show up. So, if you file something there, we see it right away.
Forum: http://forums.microsoft.com/
A lot of Microsoft people read and answer forum posts everyday. Also, many MVPs and experts hang out there also.
Blogs: http://blogs.msdn.com/
A lot of teams have blogs and you can send feedback directly through blogs. All the feedback entered into blogs get sent directly to team members via email.

If you are having issues with following features, you can also send feedback directly to me via this blog. My team (Visual Studio Professional Data) is responsbile for these and I will guarantee that I will at least give you an excuse if I cannot resolve the issue for you! ;)

Query Designer
SQL CLR Projects and Deployment within Visual Studio
Typed DataSet & DataSet Designer
Typed TableAdapter & TableAdapter Configuration Wizard
BindingSources
BindingNavigator
Server Explorer inside Visual Studio
Data Source Configuration Wizard
Database Project template in Visual Studio
DDEX (Data Designer Extensibility which is a part of Visual Studio SDK)

When your customer gets mad

youngjoo — Fri, 28 Apr 2006 10:27:00 GMT

No matter how hard you try, you cannot make every single customer happy with the product you ship. There will be bugs and someone will get seriously mad after fighting with your product for several days. I received an email from a very angry customer yesterday. Few sentences in that email that clearly showed me that whoever sent this email was very very mad.

Email started with below sentence.

Hi, this is just driving me nuts!

And the customer explained what he tried to do. Then let out his anger with below sentences.

...after that it can be a crap shoot...
...it can crash VS 2005 clean out .... no error mesage, no dialog, no re-start VS ..... just a sudden drop to the desktop!!...
...in the last 3 days I have had to re-start windows and VS about 50 times (or some crazy number of times)...

So, clearly this person was fighting with Visual Studio and getting more and more frustrated. And, to be honest, I also got frustrated by his email also. It did not have any useful details for me to help resolve the problem. Instead, it was full of complains in angry tone. 'How in the world can I help you if you just vent and not provide useful information?' was literally what I was thinking. But as soon as I was able to calm down, I realized that this person could have spent several nights trying to figure out what's going on. I would have gotten mad if I was in his shoes. So, I sent out below email.

Hello,

It will be very helpful for us to track down the problem if you can file a bug in our Product Feedback Center with as much detail as possible.
You can access our Product Feedback Center from http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/productfeedback/.

Once we receive a bug, we will have someone assigned to the bug to try to resolve it for you.

We would need more information than the detail you provided below.

Thanks!

Simple. Acknowledge that we could have caused this. Provide next step. And make a reasonable promise. Below is what the customer said in reply.

Will do, thanks....
Mostly I like vs 2005 and the tools .... but when things go wrong and your trying to finish some stuff before the day is over.... gets under the skin and makes one ready to scream / shout etc.... :--)

BTW: I go back to sql 6.5 and Access 1.0 and other older stuff....
So when I read some folks blogs and such it's just funny....
Like tuning indexes and sql jobs today with the tools Vs. back with sql
6.5
-- way better today !!

Just got time today to show a co-worker how to do a SQL CLR s-proc and some scalar functions in t-sql and the guy was just loving the power of sql 2005.

Thanks again.

Completely different tone and even praised our work. The last part about sharing SQL CLR with his co-worker is the best part. Notice how a quick response to the customer that showed that I cared about his problem completely turned customer's attitude around. After all, this person was very happy with our products. Just got frustrated after a huge fighting match with Visual Studio.

By listening to the customer and showing how much you care about customer's issues, you can easily make an angry customer your friend who would tell others to buy your stuff. Yes, it's very important to find new customers. But taking care of people who've already investied in your product is at least as equally important if not more. And you do it one customer at a time.

How much RAD would annoy you?

youngjoo — Wed, 26 Apr 2006 10:08:00 GMT

Peter van Ooijen @ Codebetter.com talked about RAD experience in Visual Studio 2005. He does a great job of highlighting useful features and also provide gotchas that developers should be aware of. By the way, if your job involves writing software and if you are not subscribed to Codebetter.com's RSS feed, now is a great time to do it. It's full of great tips and discussions that every software developers should read.

My team is currently in a final planning phase for Orcas (next version of Visual Studio). Since Orcas is no different from other software projects, there have been a lot of hard decisions being made. We would like to make sure that we ship the right stuff with right quality and not miss the date. Anyway, one question I am trying to answer is "How much RAD experience should we provide?" Visual Studio 2005 has made a giant leap in terms of enabling developers focus on solving real business problems without being bothered by all the mundane tasks. You can literally create a data-driven application with master-detail view without writing a single line of code. Although it's hard to believe why anyone would ship applications created this way, it's a great starting point for developers creating data-centric applications. Naturally, people would expect this RAD experience to improve in next release. Think about the history of Visual Studio from RAD point of view. Every release has provided better RAD experience.

But how far should we go? One of Visual Studio's goals is to help developers boost their productivity. But another critical goal of Visual Studio is to help developers create right software in right ways. It's a goal for all developer tools. That's why Visual Studio has features like Refactoring and Unit Testing. I agree that we can do a lot better in these areas. But at least we acknowledge that we need to help developers create right software in right ways. The problem is that balancing between RAD experience and helping developers do the right thing is always hard. Good developers spend a lot of time learning new techniques and studying best practicies. Design Patterns, security, performance, reusability, etc. And if these developers have to fight with the tool to apply what they have learned since the tool keeps trying to act like it knows what the developer is trying to do and how to do it best, then these developers will eventually abandon the tool. That's exactly why I am thinking about "How much RAD would annoy you" question.

It's a hard quesiton and it will take sometime for me to answer it (or maybe I will just keep asking and never come to a conclusion). Maybe we will try different approaches in each version. And if we see people like Peter van Ooijen keep writing article about how to work around our RAD features to do the right thing, we would know that we are not really helping developers.

Update: Forgot to mention that I agree with Peter on how bad it is for us to embed SQL statements in markup code. I am sure folks over at ASP.NET Tools have heard it many times already. This is a great example of RAD focused approach invading developer's pride.

Learn about Visual Basic and get FREE Visual 2005 Discovery Pack

youngjoo — Tue, 18 Apr 2006 09:17:00 GMT

Visual Studio 2005: The Difference is Obvious
Expand your skill set and increase your value in the job market. Check out the new Visual Basic 2005 Webcasts and find out how to receive a complimentary Visual Studio 2005 Discovery Pack.

Great chance to learn Visual Basic 2005 and add good resources to your bookshelf. There are 7 sessions planned, two of them already ran (replay available). Here's the list of sessions.

New Language Features in Visual Basic 2005
Data Access with Visual Basic 2005
RAD for Visual Basic Developer
Deploying Visual Basic 2005 Applications Using ClickOnce
Tools and Techniques for Upgrading Visual Basic 6.0 Applications
Creating Best-of-Both-Worlds Hybrid Applications with Visual Basic Fusion
Tools and Add-ins for Visual Basic Migration

Click on the link above to see more information.

By the way, "Data Access with Visual Basic 2005" is all about what my team is working on! :)

One step at a time...

youngjoo — Fri, 07 Apr 2006 02:42:00 GMT

When I told the team at my previous company that I was joining Microsoft, there were few who showed their disappointments. I was their Agile cheer-leader and they couldn't believe that I chose Microsoft. Why move all the way across the country (NY -> Seattle) to join the company that loves to do things in its own ways and plays deaf when others try to tell how to do it correctly? And that was when Microsoft pretended that they knew what TDD was better than anyone else in the planet.

I had one simple answer to those.

"That's exactly why. Wouldn't it be great if I can help them become more Agile?"

Of course, that's not the only reason why I joined Microsoft. Building great software that impacts thousands of people was something I've always wanted to do and Microsoft was the perfect place to do that. But I definitely wanted to challenge myself and see if I could make Microsoft become more Agile. By the way, I currently do not have any plan to go knock on Bill Gate's door and tell him to understand Agile values and transform the entire company to become more Agile. I will be happy if I can start making small changes and see this company naturally embrace Agile values.

And I have a great news to share with my former Agile cult members. Today, I made my first step towards my goal. A new group called Visual Basic Agile Champ has been officially formed today. The goal of this group is to become a resource for people inside Visual Basic who wants to learn and try Agile values and practices. It's a small team for now (4 including myself). Mike Sampson, SDE, has been working on recommanding process improvements to Visual Basic. Chris Smith, SDET extraordinaire (his word), has worked with Mike on pilot XP projects and had great successes. Stephen Provine, SDE, has a deep passion around unit testing. He has done some great stuff around improving unit testing capabilities in Visual Studio (and I had great conversation with him about Microsoft TDD incident). These are people who want to make changes, who are passionate about helping people do their job better and truly believe that it's possible. I am honored to be invited to join the team.

What's really great about this team is that it has management support. And I know very well what can happen when you do not have a full support from management.

Making the first step is always exiciting. It's only one step but you know your journey has started. Just need to make sure that every move you make puts you one step closer to your destination.

Agile rocks!

[Update] By the way, Mike Sampson is the guy who appeared in Quality Milestone video I mentioned before. He clearly has big interest in this stuff...

SQL Server 2005 Everywhere Edition announced

youngjoo — Thu, 06 Apr 2006 21:14:00 GMT

Today, Microsoft announced its plan to make SQL Server 2005 Everywhere Edition available later this year. This one is targeted for what we call Occationally Connected Systems (OCS) such as mobile devices.

Links:

SQL Server 2005 Update from Paul Flessner
The little database that could: Deploying SQL Mobile as a local / single user database across Microsoft Mobile devices

Scoble-less Microsoft

youngjoo — Sat, 01 Apr 2006 12:28:00 GMT

Robert Scoble is leaving Microsoft and he's joining Google. Be sure to read his post. It's the best post he's ever done.