Microsoft
For reasons that are too deathly boring to go into here, I’ve changed my name on Twitter. Because I ended up creating a new profile instead of changing the name (again, for reasons not worth talking about), you’ll need to re-follow if you’re interested in what I might have to say there. New location: http://twitter.com/panopticoncntrl. Hope to see you there!
After spending a year and a half working on “M”, I’ve decided to make another change in what I’m doing and and move over to the SQL Server Programmability team. That’s the team responsible for things like the T-SQL language and runtime in SQL Server. Working on “M” was a lot of fun and the team was great, but after spending a good, long while down in the bowels of a GLR parser, I decided that that was enough and that it was time to do something else. Working on SQL Server programmability is, in some ways, a combination of...
Charles just posted a new “Expert2Expert2Expert” talk on Channel9 on “Programming Data.” This was a talk, moderated by Erik Meijer, with me and Michael Rys about data and programming and “M” and SQL Server and more. It was an enjoyable conversation but Erik did observe afterwards that I’d managed to avoid saying too much about “M” specifically! There wasn’t any mysterious intent on that one—as I said in my previous blog entry, things have been continuing to move in the “M” world and there just isn’t a lot new that I can say at the moment. Soon, hopefully, soon…
Maybe. Dare had a pointer today to a programming.reddit story that talks about competing versions of a dustup between Joel and Greg Whitten back when Joel used to work for Excel. I could care less who’s right, but the interesting implication of the story is that Joel was the one who came up with the application interface for VBA. I’m not sure that’s entirely true—a lot people worked on VBA—but if it is, he might be responsible for nearly driving a former co-worker insane. When I started at Microsoft, I worked on Access. Access used a version of...
While I was hanging out at the Addison-Wesley booth, I picked up a copy of two updated editions that I’d been eyeing. One is the updated C# Programming Language specification that includes a lot of hard work by Mads: And the other is the updated Framework Design Guidelines: Both look just awesome. I think they’re also supposed to be giving out this sooner or later: So I can hopefully pick up one of those too!
I just wanted to give a shout out to my fellow Oslo employee Vijaye Raji whose Small BASIC project just launched on the new DevLabs site. It’s a version of BASIC targeted at truly beginning programmers, and I think it’s a great example of how BASIC can be utilized to make things very simple and easy to use. I got the chance to see Small BASIC in action being taught to high schoolers and it was wonderful to see the kids start to make the connection between what they were doing and what they could do. It’s a great project,...
While I was out on vacation last week, Beth posted a video that she did at one of our language design meetings on Channel9. Check it out. If you get confused about the joke about the gray shirt, Beth also explains that on her blog. I had a little more to say in this video than I did in the one of the design meeting that I go to as a guest...
Just a little shout out to the latest project by that crazy language pimp, Erik Meijer. (He's the guy you have to thank for much of LINQ and especially for XML literals in VB.) In its own words, Volta is... [...] a developer toolset that enables you to build multi-tier web applications by applying familiar techniques and patterns. First, design and build your application as a .NET client application, then assign the portions of the application to run on the server and the client tiers late in the development process. The compiler creates cross-browser JavaScript for the client tier,...
For those readers of my blog in Japan (or who can speak Japanese), I'm being features on MSDN Japan's "Ask the Experts!" page this month. There's a short introductory video I shot, plus the opportunity to submit questions (or so I'm told) which I will answer later this month. So, if you've got something to ask, submit it and I'll be happy to answer!
Back in December, when discussing my bout of writer's block, I said that I should probably write an entry "What the Hell I Do [at Microsoft]," since I think that the question is sometimes a little murky (even to me). Most of my career I was just a "developer" or "manager," but now that I am an "architect," things are a little more complicated. As far as I can tell, "architect" is such a general title at Microsoft that it's practically meaningless. It can mean totally different things in different organizations. In my case, being an "architect" seems to mean: I've...
Being on parental leave and not that up-to-date on the world, I wasn't aware of the disappearance of Jim Gray until this morning, when I opened my New York Times and saw a familiar face, much to my surprise. (The last and only other time that happened, someone who was in my class in college had won a Pulitzer.) I don't really know Jim well, but have crossed paths with him more than a few times in the past several years. The latest was my trip to Japan for the launch of VS 2005 and SQL Server 2005, where I did...
Omer van Kloten's entry on Internationalization of Programming reminded me of a (possibly apocryphal) story that I was told when I started working on OLE Automation. I asked why IDispatch::GetIDsOfNames takes an LCID and was told that once-upon-a-time, the VBA team conducted an experiment in localization with VBA in Excel (which was the first application to host VBA). Apparently, they attempted to localize the entire language--keywords, function names, etc.--into French, and possibly other languages. This mean you could write code along the lines of what Omer outlines in his entry, except in French instead of Dutch. The problem was that because...
Interested in working for Microsoft? Want to build a compiler? Want to work on the coolest programming language ever? (Note for the humor-impaired: that last statement includes an implicit self-deprecating wink and a smile.) Don’t want to mange managers? We’ve also opened a new position on the compiler team that involves working directly on the compiler/language and doesn’t require managing people:
Want to help chart the future of one of the most popular programming languages in the world? Interested in building a highly interactive tool that brings programming to the masses and makes professional programmers even more productive at the same time?...
I thought of this old post of mine today…
Sometimes a useless Microsoft story crosses my mind and I think “gee, that might be mildly amusing to post on my blog.” But the story’s small enough that I don’t really have a good hook, which means that it’s hard for me to justify posting it. Well, Adam’s given me a good enough hook to hang a few stories on:
One that I hadn’t thought of is the fact that I’ve been around long enough (14 years last week!) to be an and-1, with the alias paulv. The interesting thing, though, was that when I was an intern 15 years ago...
Interested in working for Microsoft? Want to build a compiler? Want to work on the coolest programming language ever? The Visual Basic compiler development lead position is open and we’re looking for someone with the right stuff to fill it:
Microsoft Visual Basic is used by millions of developers worldwide, and is widely acclaimed for both its power and ease-of-use. As the next Development Lead of the Visual Basic Compiler and Editor team, you will be the guiding hand behind the development of the next version of Visual Basic's powerful programming language. Data/Language integration -LINQ-, advanced IntelliSense and other editor features,...
Erik Meijer has posted an announcement for Lang .NET 2006, a Microsoft-sponsored language conference, over on Lambda the Ultimate that I thought I would point out to any readers who might be interested. A bit of the announcement:
Lang .NET 2006 is a forum for discussion of programming languages, managed execution environments, compilers, multi-language libraries, and integrated development environments. It provides an excellent opportunity for programming language implementers and researchers from both industry and academia to meet and share their knowledge, experience, and suggestions for future research and development in the area of programming languages.
Lang.NET 2006 will be held from...
Because it’s much less likely that some a**hole is going to come in to your office and steal your ShipIt awards. So far I’ve recieved eight product boxes, and four of them have been stolen out of my office. Three of them (VB 6.0, VB 2002 and VB 2003) disappeared out of my office sometime in the last week. What possible benefit anyone could get from old product boxes is beyond me…
(More context on this entry can be found here.)
Looks like Jay Roxe is looking for product managers for Visual Studio and Visual Studio Tools for Office. If you’ve got that magic combination of geekiness and marketing-savvy, check ‘em out…
To join in the chain of reminiscences, I have to say that I fondly remember Almost Live! as an invaluable resource to me when I was a new transplant to Seattle back in 1992 knowing no one and virtually nothing about the city. How else was I to know that Ballard was full of old Norwegians who couldn’t drive? That Freemont was populated almost entirely by hippies? That Aurora Ave. was the place to go to get a hooker? This was all great stuff for someone fresh to the city and without a clue!
Like Raymond, I think that the sketch...
I’ve been thinking about coining a new verb:
go steveb tr.v. To suddenly escalate an issue to the CEO/President/Senior VP of a company out of frustration when dealing with a low-level employee of a company. (steveb is the email address of Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer.) As in, “Yeah, we were talking about the fact that we cut that new feature the customer wanted and I said there wasn’t anything I could do about it, so he went all steveb on me and emailed my VP.”
To go steveb is really kind of the Hail Mary pass of the corporate world: you’ve exhausted...
…I have to say I’m very heartened by Erik Ruker’s discussion of the features in the upcoming Access 12. My outside perception is that not a lot has been happening with Access in the past few releases (something that I’m sure is not totally true, but there you are), but it looks like they’re definitely getting a lot of traction in Access 12. Lots of interesting stuff coming up! I’m looking forward to the beta…
I’m glad to see that Brad and Krzysztof’s Framework Design Guidelines book is finally now in stock on Amazon! Not coincidentally, I just received my own copy of it in the mail yesterday and I know it’s going to be one of the books that’s not going to make it to the shelf because I’ll be referring to it all the time… It’s a great resource for anyone who designing .NET libraries that other people have to use (i.e. most of us at one time or another) because it distills thousands and thousands of man-hours worth of experience writing .NET...
I've made it to the PDC and managed to dodge, so far, the power outages. Hooked up with a bunch of other VB'ers for dinner and now I'm trying to figure out when I'm going to get everything I've got to get done done in the next four days... Dinner, though, was good - good food, good conversation. It occurs to me that one of the real reasons we have conferences is to get everyone out of the office so we can mix outside of the little groups that we tend to move within at work. Lots of good cross-talk...
Something random the other day make me think of an old email I’ve kept stuck in the archive folder, and I thought people might find it amusing. Many years ago, a coworker sent around an entirely tongue-in-cheek email on “How to be a PM” in which he covered the many underhanded ways that a Program Manager could get a developer to do their bidding (not surprisingly, the author was a PM). So I crafted a response on how, as a developer, to deal with the underhanded tricks that PMs can play. Here it is for your enjoyment…
(Obligitory caveat: Remember, this is just a humor piece....
Larry Osterman blogged yesterday about the funky name assigned to some new expansion pack that we’re shipping, which jogged my memory about a funny naming story that’s probably old enough to be repeatable. In fact, it’s been so long that the story may be incorrect or apocryphal, so take it all with a grain of salt…
Before I worked on Visual Basic, I spent most of my time working on Microsoft Access. In fact, I interned on Access about a year before it actually shipped its first version. The name of the project at the time was “Cirrus” and it had...
Something Josh Ledgard said struck me as he was talking about an angry email he got about the introduction of the new web-based MSDN Forums:
I've heard Scoble say it a lot... if you work at Microsoft... and you blog... you had better have think [sic] skin. My own experience suggests that having an active blog at Microsoft for any length of time pretty much guarantees you your share of mails like this and it does effect [sic] you... at least it effects [sic] me. Not to get too touchy-feely, but I'm not some Borg drone that doesn't ever feel insulted....
OK, normally I try to be pretty even handed about the whole “VB vs. C#” thing since we’re all one big happy family, but sometimes I just gotta wonder... Scott Wiltamuth (he’s the product unit manager for C#) was talking on his blog about the recent Office System Developer Conference and said:
Given VBA's long history with Office, one might expect VB .NET to be the primary language among .NET developers using Office as a platform. But I've seen a lot of anecdotal evidence that C# usage of Visual Studio Tools for Office (aka VSTO) is high. I'll try to get...
In a comment to my griping about having to come up with 3 strengths and weaknesses for my performance review, Scott Mitchell pointed at one of Joel’s older articles entitled “Incentive Pay Considered Harmful.” I must have missed Joel’s posting the first time around, but I did get a chuckle out of reading his rant against the Ship-It Award (or, as some people called it “the Sh*t-It Award”). One amusing thing was that Joel didn’t tell the whole story, though. He says:
The Ship It program was announced with an incredible amount of internal fanfare and hoopla at a big company...
Every corporate culture has it's own set of acronyms, TLAs (three letter abbreviations) and jargon, and Microsoft is no different. I try not to let it slip too much into my blog entries, but a comment from M.J. Easton reminded me that a while back I did use one without explanation. In an entry talking about the DirectCast operator, I said:In addition to the fact that we like VB, it's also a great way to dogfood the product.I don't believe the verb "to dogfood" is unique to Microsoft at all, but it's certainly an integral part of our culture. It's short for "to eat...
Eric Lippert astutely pointed out a hole that I consciously left in my discussion of black hole projects - namely, that they sometimes succeed. I left that part out because I figured it probably merited a little discussion of its own and I didn't want to complicate the whole "black hole" narrative.Eric's completely correct that you could argue that .NET was a black hole project, albeit one that succeeded. It managed to hit most, if not all, of the bullet points I listed, including the last one (I started work on what would become VB.NET in mid-1998, after all, and...
After hearing about a product named Netdoc from Scoble, Steve Maine takes the opportunity to reminsce about a similarly code-named project at Microsoft (that has nothing to do with the new product). He says:
The name “Netdocs” reminds me of my experience as an intern at MS in 2000. There was this mythical project codenamed “Netdocs”, and it was a black hole into which entire teams disappeared. I had several intern friends who got transferred to the Netdocs team and were never heard from again. Everyone knew that Netdocs was huge and that there were a ton of people working on...
More funny stories from the old days.
Just something I noticed.
Found another one by accident.
Responding to some interesting comments on my entry.
Some things never change.
Thoughts about interviewing.
Thoughts on Microsoft's success.