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On Being Socially Re-engineeredWednesday, February 23rd, 2005 I do not consider myself weak-minded. For example, even though I've tried to let it happen, I've never been able to be hypnotized. Also, I'm often considered to be close-minded (although I do change my mind when valid arguments are presented, but most folks don't argue very well, I find). So, why did a terrible "High Risk Driver" course change my driving habits? The course started as you'd expect: a room full of 18-25 year olds that did not want to show up anywhere on a Saturday morning, least of all at the local level 1 trauma center for 8+ hours of lecture. The main instructor was a high-energy trauma nurse that professed an vast personal experience with all things alcoholic. The traffic cop drove a motorcycle, which he made great pains to point out was the most dangerous vehicle to drive, and told a story about how he let a friend of his drive while they were both too tired in spite of his personal expertise in all matter of influence while driving, e.g. alcohol, drugs, cell phones, sleep deprivation, etc. Of course, there was the obligatory "Faces of Death" presentation through-out the day, but they were slides, not videos, so didn't compare to the movies I saw in driver's education class at age 16. Even the stories of the people in the pictures, while sad, seemed as much about capricious bad luck as about actual bad decision making. Some of the people from the stories even came to speak to us in their wheel chairs (except one guy that came in a suit and passed his business card around), but by far the most convincing and articulate of this bunch got his injury from a diving accident (that's diving not driving). The crowning event for the day was the tour of the trauma center itself. It was filled with people who'd suffered traumas, but the vast majority of them were there for non-traffic related injuries (unless you count the guy that rode a sled into a parked car on the one day we had any snow this year). How looking at the new, state-of-the-art MRI machine or seeing nurses drink coffee on a raised platform in the middle of the room helped us learn to drive more carefully, I have no idea. And yet, despite my best efforts to avoid engaging with the materials of the class, I find that I am driving more carefully. I was always good at keeping my eyes on traffic and watching for kids and animals on the road, being quick to slow or swerve when necessary and rarely getting mad at the other drivers for bone-headed moves (unlike my wife, who curses every 3rd driver : ). However, now I find myself nearer the speed limit more often, sometimes under but always within 5 or 10 miles. And now, while I do still change lanes, it's most often when I'm behind something large that gets in line of sight and not to get ahead a car length of two. So, what changed my habits? It wasn't the lame course as a whole, but it might have been one or two moments. I might've been when the traffic cop, when asked for the most dangerous driving habits, listed speeding and aggressive driving, which I'd previously considered the least dangerous. It might've been the statistics. It's not like they showed many convincing statistics at all, but the mere fact that they had been giving this lame course 4-6 times/year for the last 17 years spoke to me about the need for some kind of intervention. Obviously, the sponsors of this course thought it was having some kind of effect, else why continue it? Or it might've been the company. I mean, their were some real losers in the room, including a 16-year old that admitted to a long list of bad decisions right out of your favorite gang movie. Frankly, to be lumped in with this crowd was just plain embarrassing. However, when all was said and done, I think it was the math. The traffic cop timed himself doing his 10-mile commute going the speed limit and going 15 miles over the speed limit. The difference w/ zero other traffic on the road? 2 minutes. Do I really need to engage in what are considered the most dangerous driving habits, risk my insurance, my car, my license, my life and the lives of the people around me for 2 lousy minutes?!? That's a bet I can only lose. Experimenting with Windows AlternativesSaturday, February 12th, 2005 When I used to teach COM, we would brag about its cross-platform-ness, i.e. it worked across Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows NT 4, etc. So, when I'm talking about Windows alternatives, of course I mean Windows XP, Windows XP Media Center Edition, Windows CE and Windows XP Tablet Edition:
BTW, I paid $6000 in college for my Mac IIcx that I used to log into the Unix machines in the lab, so I've had a full range of computer UI experiences. I do truly love Windows best. Death As A Possible ConsequenceSaturday, January 1st, 2005 When something legal comes up, I like to dig into it. For example, I did my own consulting contracts for years, I've testified against an Oregon state bill mandating Open Source Software (a bill that was never passed), I wanted to serve on a jury and I've recently become very familiar with the Oregon state eviction and small claims procedures for a rental unit I own. I find laws and procedures to be fascinating and, like most things, showing up is 80%. However, I don't like the law so much when I'm the defendant, as was recently the case when the state of Oregon was hell bent on suspending my driver's license. It seems that if you get 4 tickets in 2 years that they like you to stay home for 30 days or at least take the bus more. I've had speeding tickets on and off for most of my life, but before this 2-year period which included a total of 6 tickets (thank goodness that the state of Oregon doesn't count tickets in Washington), I hadn't had a ticket for about 5 years. Incidentally, if I could manage to spread them out in a Bell Curve instead of in a Mandelbrot Set, I wouldn't even have to be in this predicament, but natural has it's laws and who am I to consider myself above them? Anyway, the tickets should hardly count. One was 'cuz I didn't slow down fast enough in one of those coastal towns where half of the tourist revenue comes from their 100 feet of road along the highway that drops from 55 to 25 with a sign posted behind a tree. Another was on the way to Burning Man. Sure, I was going a little fast, but I spent the next week driving the dusty BM roads on my bike -- can't we do some averaging here?!? Another was an actual speeding ticket around town and that one I'll admit to, but the forth one was when I passed into a turning lane through a solid yellow line in rush hour traffic 'cuz I wanted to turn left and the line of traffic was way shorted than the line of traffic going straight, so I cheated over a few feet early. I mean, come on, that's just an efficient distribution of traffic! I was avoiding gridlock! It was practically my patriotic duty to move over into the left lane early! However, the truck that was waiting patiently to move over into the left turn lane until he had passed the solid yellow line just ahead of me didn't see it that way. Nor did the police car that had just turned the corner coming towards me as I scooted around the truck, neatly avoiding the oncoming traffic, all executed flawlessly while my wife dug her nails into my leg. So, I did what I do with all my tickets: I signed the back and I paid the money. I mean, it's not like my hairy cleavage is going to change any cop's mind, so what else could I do? When the letter from the state came that said they'd like me to turn in my driver's license for a month is when I started exploring options real quick. So, I called my tax/business/family attorney, who gave me the names of three traffic attorneys. Unfortunately, each of them specialized in Driving while Under-the-Influence and I began to think that I'd have been better off if I'd have been drunk. Each of them advised me that there was nothing anyone could do for me. I signed the ticket and I was going to have to give up my license. I also felt a very "and why are you wasting my time, you sober slug, I've got important drunk people to talk to" vibe, but that could've just been me... Luckily, once it was clear I was going to hang up the phone without giving the 3rd lawyer money, he mentioned another attorney that specialized in sober traffic offenses. This new attorney was one smooth operator. After about 5 minutes of questions over the phone, he'd figured out the "conviction" (when you sign the back of the ticket, you've agreed to be "convicted" of a crime) most likely to be turned back to trial (the passing violation, of all things). How did he determine the likelihood of getting a trial? He knew the prosecutor responsible for that part of the state! He was going to call the guy up, ask him for a solid, they run it by the judge as a formality and bang! I've got a new trial and my suspension was suspended pending the outcome of the trial. And what did I have to do? Show up in court and plea my case? ("You want the truth! You can't handle the truth! You want me crossing that line! You need me crossing that line!") Nope. Bring three character witnesses? (I have pictured Rory on the stand trying to provide a credible character assessment. : ) Nix. Lie under oath? ("Yes? Mr. Sells? This is Nancy Reagan. I'd like that Eagle Scout Award that my husband signed back, please. Seems you lied to get out of a traffic ticket...") Nine. All I had to do was send in a $750 check and do it quickly, please. As soon as it cleared the bank, I'd have my new trial (although it's illegal for him to give me "odds" on my ability to get a new trial, my attorney was clear that it wouldn't be a problem). Plus, I didn't even have to go to the trial. In fact, in a very carefully worded letter from my attorney, he let me know that I should only come to court if I could say that I didn't do it with feeling and confidence. If I couldn't do that, I should just go about my business. Note that he never actually asked me if I did it or not. I find that a particularly fascinating and scary part of our legal system. Anyway, at the trial, my "conviction" (I have to put it in quotes or you might think I was a criminal [I mean, just 'cuz I committed a crime, doesn't make me a criminal, does it?]) was over-turned in exchange for 8 hours of "driving school." This time, I'm using the quotes because there ain't no actual driving schooling going on. Instead, this is a replay of those driver's education movies where they show you "Faces of Death 3" in an effort to scare you onto the straight an narrow in a very Old Testament, fire and brimstone sorta way. Here's the descriptive paragraph from the letter I got in the mail yesterday:
I believe that participation in this program should qualify me as a "bad boy" and thereby make me the recipient of all of the benefits thereof, e.g. the alleged "good girls" that can't stay away from "bad boys" should now feel free to throw their undergarments onto the stage and to mob my limonene (it's a white '98 Volkswagen Cabrio Convertible "limo" [note the quotes] in case you're confused). The fact that my financial portfolio is fully diversified using CFA-certified asset allocation techniques, that I was a Boy Scout, that I'm married to my first real girlfriend, that I was a member of the marching band, that I was going 20 miles/hour when I committed my most recent traffic "crime" and that I wouldn't actually drive with a suspended license, thereby causing all kinds of havoc in my life, should not detract from my obvious reckless, dangerous, "high-risk" persona. Anyone need a bad boy for their boy band? I'm available... It's The Thoughts That Count...Thursday, November 4th, 2004 On an internal mailing list the other day, there was a question asking for how to make a tray notification icon come back up on the try after explorer.exe died and came back to life. Good notification icons do this and the asker wanted to know how to do it for Windows Forms. I had had a dearth of technical work at the time, so decided to dig into the problem and see if I could answer it. I started with a dim memory of a piece in MSJ by Paul Dilascia on the subject. Searching on msdn.com, I found Paul DiLascias 2/99 MSJ C++ Q&A (http://www.microsoft.com/msj/0299/c/c0299.aspx) (emphasis added by me):
From there, I dug through the SDK docs on ON_REGISTERED_MESSAGE (http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/vcmfc98/html/_mfc_on_registered_message.asp) and found:
Figuring I'd have to be able to call RegisterWindowsMessage from managed code, I surfed to pinvoke.net and found RegisterWindowMessage (http://pinvoke.net/default.aspx/user32.RegisterWindowMessage):
Now that I knew how to figure out the Window message value for which to watch, I looked back into the MSDN documentation on System.Windows.Forms.Control, the base class of Form and all other HWND-based classes in Windows Forms (http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/cpref/html/frlrfsystemwindowsformscontrolclasswndproctopic.asp) and the WndProc method I would have to override to catch the message, finding:
and:
Putting this together, I figured you could add "re-awakening" to notification icons in the following way (some compiler errors left in to keep readers on their toes : ):
After posting this answer to the list, I couldn't help but crank up a quick app to test it (after fixing the compiler errors of course : ). To my satisfaction, it worked immediately. I put up a notify icon in Windows Forms, killed explorer.exe and was pleased to see my icon show back up again when explorer.exe was restarted. However, just to make sure, I commented out my code to see my icon not be restored. Those of you familiar with the internals of Windows Forms know what happened next, of course, because my notify icon was restored properly to the tray even without my code, as illustrated by Reflector against the .NET 1.1 Windows Forms implementation:
What? Why would someone post a question about how to make something work that already worked? I figured that the questioner was referring to .NET 1.0 and I was digging through .NET 1.1 code. However, reading through the 1.0 code showed the same support, meaning that neither the questioner nor I had bothered to check for this support before running off to add it. So, the lesson? Write your tests first! Still, I learned a bit along the way and that was fun. : ) The Importance of ReputationThursday, November 4th, 2004 My youngest son was called into the office today for pantsing a kid on the school playground. That is not at all like my son (he's the sweetest kid you'd ever want to meet), but the principal was new, so she was talking about suspension. Luckily, the secretaries knew my boy, so they were able to point out the inconsistency of that behavior with the reputation he had built in 4 years at the school. It turns out that the pantsed boy was cutting in line in front of my son, who didn't like it, so pushed him right back out of line again. The "cutter" took a swing, my boy swung back and in the process (they're only 9) they both fell. My son reached out to grab the boy's shirt to catch himself, not knowing that the other boy was also falling and got the pants instead, causing the aforementioned "pantsing." The moral of this story is an old saying I heard when I was a kid and have lived by since: "If you rise at dawn, you can sleep 'til noon." In other words, if you build yourself a reputation for good things, when occasionally you stray, folks will cut you some slack. The converse of this rule is that if build yourself a reputation for bad things, that could well stick with you for a long, long time.. Every Story I've Ever WrittenThursday, October 7th, 2004 I was working with a potential author on an article he'd like to write covering some ground I left uncovered in my original No-Touch Deployment piece for MSDN Mag. Anyway, he sent me the list of topics and then said the following: "There is a fair amount of material here it might benefit from being broken into chunks. I think I will write about small chunks at a time and then we see how much belongs in one article. Rereading your original article it struck me that you had [a] story that held it together, I need to find one for me." I've heard this kind of thing before, i.e. people ask how I turn a seemingly random set of topics into "a story." I'm all for that, but it's not really such a chore. In fact, here's the essence of every technical piece I've ever written:
The secret is really building up from what the reader already knows with some minimal new, interesting thing and keep on like that 'til you've covered the ground you want to cover, stringing things together with transitions that give the reader the impression of one contiguous story. If you really want to get fancy, put a personal anecdote at the front that you use as an analogy, bring it up a few times during the piece and then wrap up with something clever that ties the your anecdote together with the ground you've covered by extending the analogy in a humorous way (but that's optional). Settings, Collections and VS05b1 (oh my)Thursday, October 7th, 2004 I sat down to write a new Windows Forms application in .NET 1.1 the other day, but the Visual Studio 2005 beta 1 called to me with its "menu strips" and its "user settings" and most especially its "generics," and I just couldn't resist. To start with, it was such a pleasure to add a menu strip, add in the standard menu items (including graphics), then just strip it down to just the menu items I wanted. Then, as I added new menu items, the menu item object names were set for me based on the menu item text, e.g. startRetrievalToolStripMenuItem instead of menuItem1, which was fabulous. Not everything was wonderful, e.g. I couldn't drag and drop menu items or use Alt+arrows to rearrange them , but overall the new menu control was a pleasant experience. Even more pleasant was the app/user settings model. To add a setting to my application, all I had to do was bring up the properties of my project, add a named setting of whatever type I wanted (more on this later) and choose whether it should be an Application setting or a User setting. Both kinds of settings are loaded automatically when the app starts and all I had to do to save them was call Properties.Settings.Value.Save() when my main form shut down. Then, with the settings in place, e.g. MyUserSetting, I could get to it after the app started from anyone in my app with a type-safe access, e.g. Properties.Settings.Value.MyUserSetting. And this didn't just work for built-in simple strings and ints and such like. Oh, no. I was allowed to add custom and collection types like System.Collections.Generic.List<MyNamespace.MyType> as well. Plus, using generics, the underlying XML serialization mechanism worked great, because all of the types are known at compile-time (settings are stored in standard XML .config files @ c:\documents and settings\<user name>\Local Settings\Application Data\<company name>\<product name_hash>\<product version>\user.config). Being able to declaratively set app and user settings of any type and then just use them in a type-safe manner, saving them with one line of code, loading them with zero lines of code and not having to flatten my collections into comma-separated lists made things so pleasant until I hit the ugly realities of beta software, especially as new features interact with existing features and each other. For example, because the default AssemblyVersion attribute is set to "1.0.*" in AssemblyInfo.cs (which has moved to below the Properties folder of your VS05 project), every time I compiled, all of my settings were lost. That seems very counterintuitive to me. Why should a user lose all of their settings with the new version of the application? To work around this, I changed my AssemblyVersion attribute to a hard-coded string that I now have to remember to change manually, blowing the benefit of having a version number that changes automatically with each build. As another example, like C++ "const" of old, generics infect your code; use them in one place and you find yourself using them all over. That was fine with me (the generic Predicate<T> for finding things in a List<T> was so handy!) except that as of b1, the Windows Forms Designer gets all unhappy when you use generics. I have every hope that this will be fixed by b2, but as of right now, if I wanted to use the Designer (and it's so sweet, how could I not want to use it?!?), I had to strip out any methods or properties in my visual code that exposed generics (although method and property implementations with generics works just fine). Stripping out List<T> brought me to the use of ArrayList instead. That worked just fine (System.Collections.ArrayList is even available via the Browse button when setting up app/user settings) until the XML serializer couldn't serialize instances of the custom type that I was using to populate my ArrayList. The error looked like this: Could not use Xml serialization for setting: SelectedExchanges. ---> System.InvalidOperationException: There was an error generating the XML document. ---> System.InvalidOperationException: The type MyNamespace.MyType was not expected. Use the XmlInclude or SoapInclude attribute to specify types that are not known statically. When I start up the debugger to see the line of code where the error is happening, I ended up in Main because the code is part of the Application start-up for which there is no source code, making this even more difficult to debug. The problem was that the underlying serialization engine didn't know what to do with this custom type. The clue was the mention of the XmlInclude attribute, which you can use to tell the serializer what types may be in the ArrayList, but you have to have somewhere to hang the attributes. In this case, that lead to a custom ArrayList type for the express purpose of informing the serializer (making me really miss the use of generics, where all of the types were specified at compile-type for me automatically): [System.Xml.Serialization.XmlInclude(typeof(MyNamespace.MyType))]
public class MyList : System.Collections.ArrayList {
public override object Clone() {
MyList newList = new MyList();
newList.AddRange(this);
return newList;
}
}
Notice also the Clone method. I added this later because the base ArrayList Clone method creates an instance of ArrayList, not my custom MyList type. Of course, since this was all run-time type errors, I couldn't let the compiler tell me about these problems; I had to run my app and find them. Very frustrating, especially when generics makes these problems all go away. Still, I'm very much enjoying the new productivity features in VS05 and Windows Forms 2.0 and when they work better together, I'll be even more happy. The Week Before Burning ManMonday, September 6th, 2004 I was just listing my activities for the week before Burning Man and amazed even myself:
Of course, after that I spent a week at Burning Man, and today we're cleaning the playa out of everything, preparing the boys for school, hanging out with the relatives for Labor Day and celebrating our 13th wedding anniversary. Starting tomorrow, I have to figure out what to do with the Longhorn Developer Center now that WinFX will be available on down-level windows, co-author two Avalon books and one Windows Forms book and run the Applied XML Developer's Conference 5. Should be fun. : ) What Makes A Book Successful?Tuesday, July 27th, 2004 I got an email today from a friend who wanted to know what he could do to make the book he had in his head successful. I've thought a lot about this topic in the genre of Windows programming (I don't have a clue how to make your bodice ripper successful), but had never verbalized it 'til now, so I thought I'd run it up the flag pole and see who burns it. DISCLAIMER: I make no claim about whether following these guidelines will make your book successful. These are just things that I think about when I'm trying to make my own books successful.
BTW, a lot of these same principles can be applied to your article writing, too, but there you know what they're paying you up front. A bunch of my friends have done the math and for the same amount of work required to produce a book, they can produce articles that pay much better. But you're not writing for the money, right? (Please don't try to write for the money...) #1 Windows Forms BookWednesday, June 30th, 2004 I just got word from my publisher that, according to the industry-wide metrics they use, Windows Forms Programming in C# is the #1 seller in it's category week-to-week by a wide margin over everyone but Petzold (who I'm still beating, but by a smaller margin). And while Petzold has sold more copies overall, he had a 2-year head start on me and I'm gaining. Further, earlier today, Amazon.com had the book listed as the #5 best selling computer book (although it's at #10 right now with a sales rank of 459 and a ranking of 5 out of 5 with 52 reviews). I normally try to toot my own horn a little more subtly than this, but the idea that I could learn Windows programming from the best-selling Windows book author of all time and then, 10 years later, beat his sales numbers makes me damn proud. Thanks to all the reviewers and folks that gave me feedback on the materials in my articles, to Shawn Wildermuth and Mike Weinhardt, who actually contributed material to the book and to Addison-Wesley for printing it (and then re-printing it, and then re-printing it... : ). A Man, A Plan, A Canal, A Librarian!Saturday, June 26th, 2004 Can't come up with a better palindrome than "a man, a plan, a canal, Panama!"? Write a program and come up with one that's 17,000+ words. I love computers and what people do with them. The most extreme thing I ever did along these lines is when my airplane was circling an airport for some unknown reason and the United flight attendant announced a contest to keep our minds off the dwindling fuel and the terrorists on the ground (oh, wait, that's Die Hard...). Anyway, she offered a free bag of peanuts (or something of equal value) to the person that could come up with the most words of 3 or more letters from the letters in the word "united" (Always Be Closing...). Did I put my Tim Ewald-expanded vocabulary to work? Did I scratch words onto a cocktail napkin as fast as I could think of them? No. In the limited time I had, I wrote a program that would come up with random combinations of letters in brute force fashion, then dumped the unique ones to a file so that I could use Word's spell checker to find the real words. I came up with 32. Did I win? No. A librarian, using her own expanded vocabulary beat me with 34 (I had been running the program to generate 1000 possibilities to speed testing but forgot to flip it back to 10,000 when it came time to run it for real). Did I stop there? Did I accept defeat gracefully, especially since it's pretty clear I had cheated in the first place? No. I went home and learned the STL permutation algorithm and wrote a program that compared against a dictionary from the web to find the 72 words of 3 or more letters in "united" (including asynchronous updates to the UI as possibilities are checked [it takes a little longer, but it's worth it...]).
Now I carry that program on my laptop wherever I go, just in case I run into that damn librarian again... P.S. I did get to use my program one more time against my mother playing Scrabble. I got my all-time high Scrabble score ever on that day. She still beat me. Did I mention she's got a bachelor's degree in library science? Damn librarians... My Experiments in Social VideoFriday, June 25, 2004 Because I'm a rarity at Microsoft, a remote employee, I've been conducting experiments in social video to increase my presence from afar. Experiment #1: Mini-MeMy first experiment was a dedicated laptop for IM audio and video that sits on my desk in building 5. The idea was that anyone that wanted to chat with me could wander by my office and start an a/v chat w/ me nearly as easily if I was actually in the office. And then, when I'm supposed to be in a meeting, instead of requiring someone to bring their laptop, with a web-cam installed, and give it up to me for the duration of the meeting so that I could see folks, they could just grab the "mini-me" laptop from my desk and bring it to the meeting. Sounds nice, eh? Doesn't work. The reason mini-me doesn't work as a stand-in for me in my office is because there's no standard account I can login with on my desktop, e.g. redmond\guest. The reason a standard account would be nice is so that I can leave it logged in all the time, tie its own .NET Passport to the account and put a shortcut on the desktop to make it IM me in video conference mode (I actually wrote an app that does just that). Unfortunately, it has to be an MS domain account so it has network access and if I leave an anonymous domain account logged in on a laptop all the time, that's an enormous security hole. And if I make folks that want a quick chat with me log in themselves, they'll will have to wait for their domain settings to migrate to the laptop, they'll have to login with their own IM account, they'll have to configure the web cam before using it and they'll have to remember to logout when they leave for the next person. Frankly, I'm not worth all that trouble when they could just call, IM or email me. So, the mini-me laptop is a bust unless I can figure out a way to get Internet access without Intranet access inside the MS corporate Intranet without requiring everyone to log in w/ their own account to get it. Oh, and it has to be in a way that works with wireless so that they can haul mini-me to a meeting without having to haul along a cable, too. Experiment #2: Maxi-Me
My 2nd experiment in social video went quite a bit better. Last week I gave two
1-hour talks back to back to the AZ .NET User Group, but the trick was, I gave
them from my house. The setup was two computers on each side. One was for
NetMeeting app-sharing (using MSN Messenger to request Remote Assistance works,
too, but I can never get MSN Messenger app-sharing going). The second is for the
video (the CPU load was too heavy to do both on one computer). Voice was done
over the phone, which they put through their PA system. They also had two
computers, both attached to video projectors, broadcasting my screen using one
projector and my image using another (can you imagine how disturbing it must
have been to see the giant, pixelated maxi-me? I shudder at the thought : ). In general, I believe that ubiquitous a/v conferencing is inevitable. I just I'm just a bit ahead of the curve. : ) My Day With Edward TufteFriday, June 25, 2004 I spent most of Thursday in a seminar given by Edward Tufte, the author of several seminal books in the area of data analysis and presentation (with another, Beautiful Evidence, in the works). I enjoyed it thoroughly and here's what I was able to capture: Tufte's Grand PrinciplesThe goal of good information design is to minimize the amount of time spent figuring out the design of the presentation of information (or even admiring it) and maximize the time spent reasoning about the information. Good designs should be as nearly invisible as possible. Tufte: "The point of an information display is to assist thinking. Good design is clear thinking made visible. Bad design is stupidity in action. Chart junk is a good sign of statistical stupidity." My favorite Tufte term is what he calls designers brought in to make boring numbers look interesting: "chartoonists." Ed's Grand Principles of Analytical Design
Tufte: "Don't let the marketing people corrupt your presentations by eliminating detail. Chances are, the people looking at the information know more than the marketing people. People haven't suddenly gotten stupid just because they come to hear you talk. If people can read the financial tables and the sports tables from the paper, they can get read data from you." (The last point assumes a good design.) In my own work, I often remove detail for clarity, but I'm very careful to leave enough details to keep context. I admit, it's a fine like to walk and hard to get right. As a way to pack more data into a small space (and in an attempt to secure his immortality, imo), Tufte was inspired by Galileo's work to create a new kind of graphic meant to be integrated into a sentence as yet another word. He calls them "sparklines" (the sparkline is the graphic before each word):
Sparklines pack a lot of information into a small space and are a cool alternative to graphics that break the flow of thought and need to be called out with a phrase like "as seen in Figure 3." I have a mind to implement them in Avalon when I get a chance. 90% ContentTufte hates most kinds of user interfaces because they spend too much of the already low resolution screen on "fluff," e.g. menu bars, captions, navigation, etc, and too little on the content itself. As an example, he showed a screenshot of a photo display app that used only 18% of the screen for the actual photos. He wants nearly invisible operating systems and apps and 90% of the screen used for the content. He's a big fan of Google News as a way to pack in a lot of information and he's a big fan of scrolling. For web sites, Tufte recommends only a small set of links at the top of each page for navigation and nothing else. His own site is like this and I have to admit, I like it. Design For High ResolutionEd hates low resolution. He wants everyone to design for high resolution to be viewed at 22 inches so you can pack a lot of information in, showing comparisons and causality. He hates PowerPoint because it's made to be viewed from 22 feet and doesn't provide a lot of room for showing dense data, comparisons or causality. It's far easier for humans to make judgments when they can see everything at once instead of sequenced one slide after another (or "one damn thing after another," as Tufte says : ). In general, he believes everything should be printed and that PowerPoint should only be used for showing pictures to an art class. I see his point, but ironically, when he wrote a paper on the problem of PowerPoint to be read at 22", after 3 pages of him blaming PowerPoint for sloppy thinking, I put it down in disgust. If he had had his thoughts put together into PowerPoint-style format, I could have skipped ahead to find his real point, i.e. low resolution makes it hard to do serious analysis. As a point for Tufte, when producing this summary of my day listening to him, I'm mixing prose, images and references, but I'm not producing it in PowerPoint. According to Tufte, 4 pages of prose is equivalent to between 50-250 PowerPoint slides and I have to admit, it would be hard to convey what I want to say about him in a PowerPoint deck without using a lot of slides and throwing away the subtleties. In general, I believe that PowerPoint is best for reminding the presenter what they want to say and is very poor for the audience. Instead of a slide presentation, Tufte recommends providing the audience 4 pages of prose, which they read 3-5x as fast as you could say it, and then having a conversation. Interestingly, he allowed no conversation during his own presentation but instead talked to various parts of his books and hand-outs. On the other hand, has anyone even read this far? Would you have gotten farther if I'd have summarized everything in slides, skipping ahead to the juicy bits when you got bored? Giving PresentationsTufte has a great deal of advice about how to prepare for and give presentations. To prepare, you must have great content (no amount of design or practice will fix bad content) and spend a great deal of time practicing (especially important if you're not using PPT to remind you what to say). When presenting, follow these rules (these aren't all of my rules, but I agree with them):
I think that Ed has enough good things to say about how to approach the presentation and analysis of data that I would recommend that pretty much anyone involved in the presentation and analysis of information take the time and attend his day-long seminar. My First Presentation For A Distinguished EngineerMonday, June 7, 2004 Wednesday was a good day. Not only did I get birthday wishes from all over the internet (thank you, Orkut), but I got to give my first presentation to a Distinguished Engineer (or DE, as we call them in humble tones). A DE is the top end of the individual contributor ladder that technical folks who want to stay technical -- aka avoid becoming management -- are on. Architects, e.g. Don, are one step down on that ladder and Program Managers (PMs), e.g. me, are even further down. In this case, the DE to whom I was presenting is someone that I've long respected and who invented and continues to guide my favorite programming language: Anders Hejlsberg. A couple of weeks ago, Anders was digging through our docs on a topic in which he was interested because of the future directions he's got in mind for C#. However, the particular information that Anders was looking for wasn't in our documentation. So, he mentioned that he'd like someone to look into it and get the information for him. As a percentage of the 56K employees at MS, there are a very few DEs, so when one of them mentions that they'd like to see something done, that's what happens. This doesn't happens because a DE is your boss or because they decide whether you get a raise or not. This happens because smart technical folks get respect at MS and the smarter you are, the more respect you get. So, when Anders mentioned to BradA that he would like a brief on this technology, Brad found someone to give that brief: me. Why me? Well, lately I've been talking to Brad about me doing some more technical work on WinFX and Longhorn. In the past, I've written and spoken a great deal about the good and the bad of various technologies and my thinking was that if I could get into a feedback loop with the product teams so that I could help prevent some the worse bits from making it out the door, giving me the opportunity to write only nice things about our technologies. Brad already runs the WinFX review team that's in charge of making WinFX a nice place for developers to play, so when I volunteered to help with some of that work, it didn't take long for him to take me up on it. And, after a few moments of hesitation when I realized that I only knew a little more than Anders about this particular topic, I jumped at it, digging into the technology, sending "tell me more" and "review these slides, please" emails to the various product groups in charge of those technologies (it's amazing how quickly you get a response when you put "I'm writing a presentation on your technology for Anders and..." into an email : ), revised the slides, woke up in the middle of the night with the perfect set of pictures to illustrate things, etc. In short, it was a blast and I learned a ton (which you know I like : ). And the actual presentation was even more fun than the preparation. There are three kinds of talks. One kind of talk, which happens 80% of the time, is the kind of talk that doesn't really affect you one way or the other. It kind of blends in with all of the other talks you've given and doesn't really make an impact on you. One kind of talk drains you completely. This is the talk where you just can't get anyone to notice you at the front of the room and you pour all of your energy into it to make it acceptable at all. And one kind of talk, my favorite, is when the juices are really flowing and you walk out of the meeting all excited and energized. This is the kind of talk that drives me and my colleagues to all-night diners for a debrief session. This last talk was the kind that I had this time with Anders and a couple of the product teams from around the company. I was really just guiding the discussion, with Anders leading and peppering all of us with wonderful, insightful questions. I had 20+ slides with overview, pictures, details and recommendations, but I only showed 4 of them (3 of pictures and 1 of recommendations). My inability to get through all of the slides didn't matter: Anders got it all. He was interested in some of what I had to say, but also brought up points I'd never considered. What I think should be in our platform was changed by just listening to Anders ask questions. I could feel the synapses in my brain realign. It was amazing. Things will absolutely change in our platform because of the desires that Anders expressed during my presentation. What a privilege. Jury DutyFriday, May 28, 2004 Today was the first time that I was called to jury duty, even though I've been eligible for almost half of my life. I always dreaded being called when I was a consultant because the $10/day didn't cover a day's meals, let along the revenue I would miss as the sole breadwinner of the family. However, much like the body puts off illness when you just can't afford to take the time (stress has its uses), my dread seems to have put off my jury duty 'til I had a full-time job with enough redundancy to live w/o me for a day or so. Even when your job pays, most folks seem to want to get out of jury duty in any way possible. George Carlin says that the best way to get out of it is to admit to the judge that you know how to tell if someone is guilty, "It's all in the distance between their eyes..." Personally, I'm a believer in America's system of justice (I've often fantasized about a life as a prosecuting attorney and as a judge), so I didn't mind serving my turn on a jury. Unfortunately, it was not to be. While I went down to the court house, my number wasn't even called to appear on one of the two juries needed today. Doing a little math, I found out that the overall odds of me actually being on a jury were actually pretty low. Here are the stats:
Strengths and WeaknessesFriday, May 21, 2004 I took a Gallup questionnaire and 3-hour seminar on the philosophy of strength-based development. The central idea is to identify one's strengths and concentrate on those. This is opposed to general thinking which says that you should work on your weaknesses. According to Gallup, no one can really change their weaknesses much, but if you focus on your strengths, you can really make a difference in yourself. As evidence of this claim, Gallup sites a study of teaching speed reading to average and above average readers. The average readers started at 90wpm and the speed reading course increased their speed to 150wpm, an increase of 67%. The above average readers started at 350wpm and increased by more than 800% to 2900wpm. Or, to put it another way, it was 10x more effective to concentrate on a strength than to try to improve a weakness. The dark subtext of the strength-based point of view is that if I can't really fix my weaknesses, then I can only really do well in certain kinds of ways. I don't like this idea. It sounds too much like fate, which just pisses me off because I don't like the idea that it's my nature and not my effort that determines how well I do at something. When I mentioned this to one of instructions of the seminar, she looked at my strengths and said, "Oh, I see why you want to think it's you that governs how well you do," which didn't make me feel any better. My strengths, in order, are Achievement, Command, Communication, Learner and Intellection. In other words, I like to get things done, tell people what I think, learn new things and think about them. This set of strengths wasn't really a surprise, but here's one: I think DevelopMentor was speed reading for my particular strengths. DM was an environment that encouraged all of my strengths and I stumbled onto it by pure, dumb luck. On the other hand, before DM, I wasn't nearly the Communicator that I am now. In fact, I think it would've been one of my weaknesses had I taken the Gallup questionnaire 10 years ago. And if that's the case, I would have been discouraged from spending too much time working on it by, for example, teaching, presenting at conferences and writing courses, articles and books, which I think would've been a shame, because I really love to write. So, while I like the idea of concentrating on one's strengths, I still don't like the idea of ignoring one's weaknesses. Another Killer App for Web ServicesFriday, May 21, 2004 At the last Applied XML Dev.Conf., I went ga-ga over Amazon's use of web services in their business and called it the "killer app for web services." Now I'd like to revise my statement: it think that it's one of the killer apps for web services. Here's another one: exposing the functionality of all of those internal corporate services apps that are now exposed as web sites as web services instead. Now that I've been back inside of a giant corp. adrift in a sea of sites to "help" me with the various "business processes" that I have to execute, I yearn for them all to be exposed as web services. There are several problems with the internal business-processes-as-web-apps morass that we're stuck in:
For example, here at MSDN, we have package source code sent to us by authors into an MSI with a EULA, code sign it with the Microsoft key and submit it for download to the MS download site. A year ago, it took me an hour of instruction to understand the process and it involved using VS.NET to build the MSI and two separate web sites, both with several pages and tons of fields to get a folder of files available for download by our good readers. This took me 30-60 minutes to do each time I had to do it, which made me cranky, so I built this:
This tool takes the minimum number of fields necessary to turn the source files provided by the author into a signed MSI. Plus, it's a smart client, so the UI is snappy and I can make it smart about what specifically it should remember between sessions for our own uses. And, I can provide a single UI for multiple back-end services, duplicating the data between them as necessary w/o requiring the user to duplicate the data for me. The way I was able to minimize the number of fields was to build all kinds of assumptions into the app based on how MSDN does things, aka the business rules, and build my own app that programmatically generates when I need. In other words, my app combines business rules with programmatic interfaces to save me and my friends all kinds of time (the process is now about 10x faster than it used to be and 100x less tedious and less error prone). And that's the beauty of allowing programmatic access to internal business processes: it allows each group in the company to build specific apps that meet their needs more specifically, letting them consolidate the processes into their own group-specific tasks. Not only does this speed things up and increase consistency for our customers, but it also removes the tedium and lowers the possibility of human error. If you could gain all those benefits, would you do it? That's the promise of web services and SOA when applied internally, because it allows the groups that provide the services to be general-purpose, meeting the needs of all groups, but lets each group be specific when they apply it, instead of forcing a web interface that requires everyone to be general. Am I alone in getting aroused when thinking about this kind of thing? : ) 3 Years of SpoutingSunday, May 16, 2004 Yesterday was my 3rd anniversary of The Sells Spout. It's hard to remember back that far, but this was before any wide-spread blogging software, either client or server, before RSS and before personal email addresses were rendered nearly useless by 157 messages/day about how to enlarge our genitalia, necessitating the eventual move away from newsletters. At the time, I used FrontPage and <a name> tags to run my blog. I still use FrontPage + <a name> tags, but I also use web forms and SQL Server to track comments and generate RSS. In general, I see my site as a giant, categorized blog, e.g. Tools, Fun, Spout, etc, with a front page of descriptions of the items I add to my site and of interesting things I find in the world. Towards that end, I'd like to rebuild my site from scratch using some kind of content management system so that I can get a bunch of flexibility that I don't have now, e.g. referral logs, auto-archive pages, comment notifications for me, rich comments, a smart client front end for reading from -- and adding content to -- the site, etc. I could add all of that to my own homebrew software, but I'd prefer to use something like .Text. In fact, assuming ScottW integrates .Text into ASP.NET 2.0, rebuilding my site with both is something that I've very likely to do. The site itself is 9 years old, but my normal outlet of tools, code samples and technical writing wasn't enough for me, so 3 years ago, I started editorializing on The Sells Spout. I don't know what my site traffic was 3 years ago, but I know it's grown ridiculously since then for no reason that I can discern. For example, last month my site served 885K sessions and 2.5GB in small pages, zip files and RSS feeds. While full 55% of the page hits were the RSS feeds (quite a number of you are keeping a close eye on me, apparently), that left 398K people/month visiting my site to read or respond to a topic from my blog (18.7% of the total), read about interviewing at Microsoft (10.6% of the total) or download a tool (4% of the total). BTW, for those of you who would point out that my RSS feed is syndicated as the Editor's Blog for the Longhorn Developer Center, throwing off my site stats because of the traffic on the DevCenter itself, I'll counter with one word: caching. Kent Sharkey, the editor of the ASP.NET Developer Center and expert in all things ASP.NET, has built caching into the control that displays the Editor's Blog from my RSS feed. Since it's set to 60 minutes of cache per server and hosted on the 11-server MSDN web farm, that's at most 8184 sessions/month to serve my RSS feed on msdn.com. I don't really know what draws that many people to my site, but 3 years ago, I stated my rules of engagement as follows: After 3 years, my agenda remains the same. I find that strangely comforting. The Advice of Our FathersFriday, May 14, 2004 Being a Midwesterner, my father is a fairly stoic man and, unlike his son, doesn't often speak just to hear the sound of his own voice. Still, I've managed to pick up a few gems over the years that my own sons are now forced to hear often, like "If something is worth doing, it's worth doing well," "It's the hard things that are worth doing," and "It's easy to figure out the right thing to do -- it's the hardest" (do you detect the Midwest work ethic in any of these sayings? : ). When I was having trouble with a pair of 6th graders (I was a 3rd grader), he said, "Don't start a fight, but make sure that you end it" (that was hard to implement...). When I went off to college, he said, "Don't go to bed drunk" (I always regret it when I ignore this piece of advise...). When I broke something of my wife's and wasn't contrite enough, my father, working on wife #3 at the time, said to me, "You've got to be nice to your wife!" But the one that sticks with me most, the one I hear in my head almost every time I make a sandwich (and the one that caused me to write these words) is "Don't get the God Damn jelly in the God Damn peanut butter!" To this day, with my father 1500 miles away in Fargo, I still make sure that there's no jelly on my knife when I reach for the peanut butter. It's funny what unintended impressions you leave on people. I wonder what about me will haunt my children? Post/Reply Alphabet SoupSunday, April 25, 2004 Newsgroups, mailing lists, web forums and blogs (with comments) are all very similar. Fundamentally, they'll all about posts and replies. Sometimes the posts are replicated to servers around the world, acccepting replies in the same way. Sometimes the posts are replicated to a set of subscribers via SMTP and replies come in via POP3. Sometimes the posts are part of a web page and provided via HTTP, using HTML forms to take replies. Sometimes the posts are served up via a centralized server using HTTP + RSS or HTML, accepting responses via HTML forms or the CommentAPI. Fundamentally, it's all the same thing, though: posts and replies. Why do I have to suffer with the limitations of any one of these protocols just to hang out with my friends to talk shop? I don't like newsgroups because I don't like having a separate reader outside of my mail reader (and NewsGator ain't anywhere close to what I want yet). Plus, newsgroups are very susceptible to spam, although the MS newsgroups are carefully patrolled to kill it before it spreads. I don't like web forums because I either have to poll the site (which RSS has cured me of) or the integration of the forum into my mail reader is limited to notification only. Plus, every single web forum has a vastly different UI and set of features and the inconsistencies bug me. On the other hand, web forums are pushing the envelope on features that I really want, like author and content ratings. I love mailing lists, but don't want to duplicate any of the WinFX newsgroups in mailing lists just yet to avoid fracturing the budding developer community. Blogs are wonderful, of course, and RSS is the only thing that's worth me spinning up a whole separate reader than my mail reader, but it's impossible to follow a thread of conversation between blogs or comments on other people's blogs. On the other hand, the server-per-poster model is great because I can just subscribe to the posters that I like, increasing the signal to noise ratio substantially. I think we should pack all of the features of mailing lists, newsgroups, web forums and blogs into a single backend and expose it via HTTP, NNTP, SMTP/POP3 and RSS as appropriate. Is it time for a new protocol that can be dumbed down to the existing protocols for the diehards that won't give up their readers of choice? Personally, I'd like to get everything via SMTP/POP3 except for my RSS feeds (although I don't know why -- maybe it's just that I can't seem to get a handle on a keyboard-only mode for RSS reading in NewsGator the way I can in SharpReader...). Freeing My MindSaturday, April 24, 2004 I'm a sucker for new experiences. It's not that I believe that "you only go around once," because I don't believe that. I believe that our job on this plane of existence is to raise our level of consciousness to the next level and that our souls are recycled from life to life on this plane 'til we're ready for the next. So, I figure that anything I don't get to do in this life, I can do in the next. And yet, I'm still a sucker for new experiences. In any given 10 years, most folks get 1 year of experience 10 times, but I think I've done pretty well at squeezing quite a bit out of my last 10 years. And I hope to continue to do that. For example, this year my wife and I will be attending Burning Man. We'd never been, but a couple of my friends from MSDN are helping us find our footing at what promises to be a very unique experience indeed. MSDN is, in fact, a haven for unique folks willing and able to help me try new things. As another example, last week I had a private meditation lesson from Henry Borys, MSDN editor, book author and meditation teacher for the last 30 years (he's been teaching meditation since I was 4!). He runs weekend seminars and even a yearly trek to the Himalayas and while both sound attractive, my Redmond travel schedule almost never brings me there over a weekend (let alone to the Himalayas : ), so he invited me up to his place for a private lesson. It was beautiful. It was 30 minutes north of the hustle and bustle of the MS campus and right on the shores of the Puget Sound. We sat on his back porch, watching the sun set over the water and talking about his experiences in meditation (mostly in variations of transcendental meditation [TM in meditation speak]) and my experiences applying what I'd picked up on my own reading Meditation for Dummies (I have come to love the Dummies books). We spent almost two hours meditation and discussing meditation. Here's what I learned:
And one of the most fun techniques that Henry introduced was to realize that thoughts are merely interactions with your consciousness. This realization can make your thoughts abstract, which can actually push you deeper into the meditation itself. In other words, when you think of thoughts this way, the more you have of them, the better, which was non-intuitive to my previous understanding of meditation. Hearing this was a very "there is no spoon" kind of moment to me. I was actually looking for some kind of introduction to meditation for months before I learned that Henry was a teacher, even though I've known him for more than a year, showing that once again, when the student is ready, the teacher will appear. I look at this experience as help along the way to a higher plane of existence, which I believe is defined within. And while I'm not a practitioner of any religion (I'm ex-Catholic), I do see this as a spiritual pursuit, blending the beliefs I've picked up with my brief brushes with Gnosticism and Buddhism and as popularized in The Matrix (although lost again in those stupid sequels). Free your mind, indeed. More On The Quest To Kill CodeWednesday, April 14, 2004 You're remember the last installment in my continued quest to find the next big leap in program producing productivity (the last two were OO and managed environments), where I thought I had it all figured out with generic algorithms. All we need is a sophisticated enough environment and wham self-writing, self-maintaining, self-debugging algorithms baby. However, after this evening's Portland Nerd Dinner (you didn't pass up a chance to meet Ward Cunningham, did you?), I'm thinking there's one step in the middle (at least : ). So, picture the scene. After hearing about a guy that has a "fob" on which he has to enter a password to get a 6-digit number that changes every 60 seconds to that he could log into his company's VPN, declaring that that's what happens when you let Keith Brown run the world (I love you, man : ), and describing the CSSM (the Chris Sells Security Model -- which I can not only implement under .NET, but actually apply to code [maybe I'll start a workspace...]), I turned to Ward and asked him the same question that I had asked the group from the last PND, i.e. "What's the next big leap away in development?", being careful not to give him my thinking from last time. Ward went a whole other way. And he got me thinking it's a good idea. So, Ward starts describing how to use loose typing (as in computer science "types" and what you do with your 101-Key Text Wizard) and TDD-style tests to infer types for your loose typing and I'm shaking my head, 'cuz I still gotta write the code. Then a long-haired guy to my left who's name I never lernt (I meant to!), starts talking about how each leap in the past came from handling one detail that you don't care about, e.g. register allocation, memory management, etc, and I think that has the possibility of helping me, 'cept the thing I want to get rid of is the code (I mean, if I can't make a business on generating the stuff, then let's kill it altogether : ). Then Jim Blizzard starts asking an interesting line of questions about whether a leap is really a leap 'til we're passed it and we can look back and decide it was a leap. While I think a leap is a leap because you can feel it (I can still remember the joy of my first program [leap 1], hear the ping in my head when I understood OO [leap 2] and feel the rush in my veins when I got managed programming [leap 3]), I was very interested in Jim's point because I think he was leading me somewhere [leap 4?]. Then, Ward jumped in again with another scenario where you start from nothing and have a programmer at your elbow to translate the next thing you want as you desire it (the first such scenario was Ward's Adventure Diet where you start with nothing, then add one kind of food/day 'til you pass the unit tests I guess [Ward actually put himself on this diet for a while -- man, we are nerds]) and that's when I nearly leap across the table so that I can get my own words in edgewise, literally telling Warm that he had to stop talking now so that I could. Because that's when it all hit me. What I want is X1 for programs. I've fallen in love with X1 because it gives me immediate gratification. It still finds the same things that Outlook search and Explorer Search finds for me, but X1 does it in such real time that I can narrow in several fields at once based on what I know about what I'm looking for, e.g. some of the body content and/or who it's from and/or what folder it's filed in and/or when I got it, etc, until I see a small number of choices from which to pick and I can click on one and say "aha! that's the one!" I want X1 for programs. I want to start with nothing and keep refining it with commands like, "I want an app," "I want a grid" and "the data should come from here" and have my computer say, "Would you like an app like this, this or this" and "would you like the grid to look like this, this or this." And I want my computer to know about every feature that ever been built into 3 or more programs, e.g. from remembering the spot my window was the app last ran to dropping in pivot tables, from reading/writing to/from databases to providing theming. Anything that doesn't work in 3-6 choices, e.g. color themes do but individual colors don't, I want a Property Browser/Windows Forms Designer-like experience and only when I get to implementing something that hasn't already been implemented 3 times do I even want to think about writing a line of code. 'cuz here's the thing. I don't want to give up writing code. I love writing code. I just hate writing code that's already been written. What I want is for a customer to go through all of the stuff in the Codeless, Human-enabled, Realtime, Interactive System (or CHRIS*, if you will : ) as described in the previous paragraph, get to an actual working system except that it doesn't do some cool, unique thing that no one's ever thought of before and then send it to me in an email along with a PO for how much they're willing to pay for me to do the last bit. When the last bit's been written 2 more times, it goes into the CHRIS and around we go again. And I was all happy with that answer and I presented it the PND crowd just before the Sells Brothers (who had come along and been absolute angels for more than 2 hours while I geeked out with my friends), lost it and started throwing their shoes at each other in the Washington Square Mall food court, at which point I had to leave, before hearing what Jim's point was or what Ward was going to say after he said, "OK, wait, what about this..." which is usually what he says just before he tells you that he's already built what he's been warming up to for the last 30 minutes and you find that it rocks. So, you guys damn well better tell me what happened after I left, especially if it's better then the CHRIS! BTW, why isn't anyone filming these PNDs? They're the best techie conversations I have all month... * I swear that 90% of that acronym (abbreviation?) came out naturally and was only tweaked slightly at the end for marketing appeal. : ) I'm Loving the .NET Fx ARMSaturday, April 10, 2004 I enjoyed the annotations in The .NET Framework Standard Library Annotated Reference so much that I read them all in one sitting (in the bathtub, if you must know...). The annotations are where the authors put in their 2 cents about a particular class, method or property and it was very interesting. Here's what I learned just from that part of the book:
If I can get that much out of just the annotations, imagine what I could learn if I read the whole thing. : ) Filling In Missing Computer Science KnowledgeTuesday, April 6, 2004 Sometimes I get emails from folks that don't have a formal computer science knowledge and want the benefits of one w/o actually going back to college. Since I was disappointed in my own formal education (despite going on to "better" my BS in Computer Science with an MS), I can understand this desire. My first thought was the MIT Open Courseware, which has a full course of computer science curriculum. However, while the course material is all there, unless there are officially sanctioned forums for each course, there's really no place to ask questions even of fellow students. After thinking on it for a while, I thought I'd go right to my favorite source. Prof. Joe Hummel is a professor of computer science at Lake Forest College in Illinois and has spent a lot of time thinking about how to fill in missing CS knowledge in professional programmers (VB programmers, mostly) at DevelopMentor. Here's what he said: For starters, I'd recommend a book by Brookshear called "Computer Science: an overview" (8th edition). It's written for those new to CS, but introduces lots of nice CS concepts like algorithm analysis, theory of computation (e.g. that some problems cannot be solved!), and other things like OS, networks, DBs, etc. It's a great starter book. After that, I'd recommend books on data structures and algorithms. After that, it really depends on what his interests are: Programming Languages? Theory? Operating Systems? Distributed Systems? Software Eng? AI? Let There Be Light In The DarknessThursday, April 1, 2004 I wrote this at the beginning of 2002 while channeling my energies into the Windows Forms book. I never published it, but I liked it (and I'm in writer avoidance mode as day #2 past my due date rolls by), so I thought I'd share it: The Dark Ages, a period of five centuries beginning in 5 AD, marked a time of intellectual darkness and barbarity. A ruling feudal class kept a firm grip on their over-worked peasants in small enclaves eking out a meager living from the soil. Only lonely, isolated monks were able to record knowledge using primitive tools to painstakingly inscribing it into hand-crafted volumes, each unique and each unavailable to their fellow man. Only pilgrims and adventures, willing to endure long journeys and brave many hardships, had the chance of obtaining this secret knowledge. Finally, the Renaissance, brought on by the spread of knowledge in approachable formats using inventions like the printing press, was able to rejuvenate a weary world and bring about a period of intellectual growth and achievement that continues to this day (interrupted only briefly by the Reagan years). The Browser Age, a period of ten years beginning in 1991, marked a time of user-interface limitations and lowest common denominators. A ruling standards body kept a firm grip on their over-worked participating members in companies large and small, eking out a meager living from IPO wind-falls. Only lonely, isolated web masters were able to record knowledge, using primitive HTML to painstakingly code it into hand-crafted pages, each unique and each unavailable to their fellow programmers. Only Perl programmers and regular expressionists, willing to parse tangled byte streams and scrape many screens, had the chance of separating the data from the presentation. Finally, .NET, brought on by the spread of the information available programmatically to rich client applications using inventions like Web Services and Windows Forms [ed: and soon, Avalon], was able to rejuvenate a weary software world and bring about a period of productivity growth and achievement that will continue until long after we retire (interrupted only briefly by the Internet Bubble burst). Checking Spec. Compliance at Build TimeThursday, March 25th, 2004 Even though Ward Cunningham and I have been living only 4 miles away from each other for some years, I really didn't know that he lived in in the same state 'til he Before Ward set me straight, I thought that Test-Driven Development (TDD) was when I built a little console app to test my APIs. I routinely do this before I write an API so that I can imagine what I wish I had to program against without being encumbered with an existing implementation. Then, I run my console app(s) afterwards for testing and regression testing, but only sporadically. I knew that NAnt let me run these tests into my build process, but since I'm a VS.NET guy and I haven't done the NAnt/VS.NET integration work that I know I should do, I haven't done as much with this as I knew I should be. Plus, as it was only me, it didn't seem like such a big deal. What makes TDD a big deal, however, is when you've got a team of folks. Of course, every developer is expected to check in tests for their stuff and those would be run as part of the nightly build. But that's not the cool part. The cool part is when another developer adopts my API and puts his tests into my build process. When someone adopts an API that I build, then make certain assumptions about how it works and what side effects they can expect. TDD lets Joe R. Programmer encode his assumptions as unit test code so that when I break his assumptions during an iteration of my API, I see it as part of my compiler output.
Until I get a build error, I don't need to know or care about Joe's test. But when I do, I look at Joe's unit test code and decide whether he was right. If Joe's unit test is valid, I need to either fix my breaking change or be prepared to help everyone that uses my API to rewrite and redeploy their code. If Joe's unit test isn't valid, I've got to help Joe fix his code and prepare to help everyone else that made "invalid" use of my API to begin with. The very nicest things about TDD is that "fixing breaking changes" becomes the least painful thing to do! This is huge. In fact, it's so huge, that MS should provide an end point for people to submit their own unit tests against our Windows and .NET APIs so that when we make breaking changes, we can either fix them or know the proportion of folks affected by this breaking change. Anyway, when Ward told me this, my eyes were opened and I was changed. But he was just getting warmed up. After showing me the power of formal unit tests across a team, he then went on to describe the power of putting the unit tests right into specifications themselves. For example, imagine a table in a spec laying out a series of inputs and expected outputs:
Now imagine a parser that could read through this table and execute the code being specified, checking expected output against actual output, lighting matching output green and mismatched output red:
This scheme lets designers define the spec long before it's implemented and then check it's progress as it's implemented. Likewise, a spec itself can be put into the build process as another set of unit tests. Plus, the readability and maintainability of specs in this format is much improved and very much more accessible then unit test code. But wait, there's more. This isn't some pipe dream. Ward has a .NET implementation of it called the FIT Framework on the web and yesterday he and I played around with it in my kitchen. Our goal was to take Ward's .NET FIT implementation and add support to it for SOAP endpoints. We started with the ISBN Information web service that we found on xmethods.org and defined the following spec:
We specified the name of the FIT "fixture" (which is the class that implements the tests in FIT), as well as the WSDL URL, the service type and method we'd like to test, the arguments we'd like to test and the results we expected to get. We mixed in some of Christian Weyer's Dynamic Web Services Proxy and we got this:
Notice that we're not quite done yet, i.e. nothing is green and we're not reaching into the retrieved XML and pulling out the Author, Publisher, etc. Still, while FIT requires a matching piece of code for every spec, we dropped a bit more metadata into the tables for the SOAP version, leveraged WSDL and have narrowed the project to a single piece of generic code for any WSDL-described SOAP endpoint (so long as Christian's code can parse it). Our plan is to finish up the extensions to FIT for SOAP and to put it into practice on the SOAP API that I'm currently designing and even to push it into our build process if I can. Further, I'd like to build another FIT fixture that, instead of executing the tests, generates sample code to demonstrate example usage and expected output (including expected errors). Rest assured, when we get it working well enough for public consumption, Ward and I will publish the SOAP extensions for your enjoyment. But don't wait for that! You can do TDD with custom actions in VS.NET 2003 and with the FIT Framework today! Avoid the GACThursday, March 11th, 2004 The .NET Global Assembly Cache (GAC) is a misunderstood and misused beast. For all intents and purposes, it provides what COM and windows\system32 do, i.e. a machine-wide place to drop shared DLLs. Of course, the problems with sharing DLLs in a machine-wide spot is that it leads to a set of well-known problems collectively called "DLL Hell." There are many problems, but the biggest is that when a shared DLL is updated, you're really updating an unknown set of applications. If the set of applications is unknown, how can you possible test them before making this change? And if you can't test them, you're likely to break them. What this boils down to is that any of the shared spots for updates, whether it's a COM CLSID, windows\system32 or the GAC, are dangerous and should be avoided. And this is why the preferred .NET deployment scenario is "xcopy deployment," i.e. having your own private copy of each DLL that you test and deploy with the rest of your application. "Aha!" you say. "The GAC supports multiple version of an assembly! When a foo.dll is updated to v1.1, v1.0 sits right along side of it so that your app *doesn't* break!" Of course, that's absolutely true. But if that's the case, why do you care? I mean, if there's a new assembly available but your app isn't picking it up, what difference does it make? "Aha again!, you say. "I can put a publisher policy into the GAC along with my assembly so that apps *are* updated automatically!" That's true, too, but now, like any of the machine-wide code replacement strategies of old, you're on the hook for an awesome responsibility: making sure that as close to 0% of apps, known to you or not, don't break. This is an awesome responsibility and one that takes MS hundreds of man-years at each new release of the .NET Framework. And even with those hundreds of man-years of testing, we still don't always get it right. If this is a testing responsibility that you're willing to live with, I admire you. Personally, I don't have the moral fortitude to shoulder this burden. For example, we do sign genghis.dll when we ship it so that folks can put it into the GAC if they want, but we make no promise of backwards compatibility between versions and therefore we do not ship publisher policy DLLs. Instead, we expect folks to use xcopy deployment and catch the problems at compile-time and test-time. So, if the GAC represents such a massive burden, why do we even have it? It's for two things that I've been able to identify:
#1 is what you get when you install Windows hot fixes and service packs via Windows Update. A ton of design, implementation and testing time is spent to make sure that existing code won't break before shipping these fixes. #2 is needed if you're going to be sharing types between assemblies that you can't deploy as a group but absolutely must keep to the same version of things. .NET Remoting peers are in this category, but only if they're deployed in separate directories so that they won't share the same set of types available via xcopy deployment. However, if .NET Remoting peers are deployed on difference machines, the GAC won't help you anyway as you'll be manually insuring the types are the same across machines. BTW, the responsibility of keeping multiple machines to the same set of types (and the same framework for hosting those types) spawned an entirely new way to talk between machines, i.e. web services, so .NET Remoting itself is something to avoid unless you can administer both ends of the pipe for simultaneous updates. Another scenario that fits into #2 is the Primary Interop Assembly (PIA). A PIA is a COM interop assembly that's been pre-generated and dropped into the GAC so that everyone that adds a reference in VS.NET to mso.dll (the COM library for Office) gets office.dll instead (the .NET Office PIA). That way, everyone can talk to the same set of types instead of everyone getting their own incompatible interop types generated on the fly. However, PIAs are primarily a way to make sure that VS.NET has a central place to pick up the shared types without regenerating new incompatible types. Notice that "Saving hard drive space" wasn't on my list of reasons to use the GAC. I just purchased a 60GB, 7200RPM hard drive for my laptop for a measly coupla hundred bucks. I don't want to hear about you jeopardizing the reliability of the applications on my machine to save a tiny percentage of that space. Hell, when I buy a HD, I give 50% of it over to apps anyway, so help yourself and keep my apps running by avoiding any machine-wide space for updating shared DLLs, including the GAC! Thanks. Discuss (did I miss any reasons to use the GAC?) Of Mixed Career MindsTuesday, February 24th, 2004 Don and I have an ongoing debate -- whether everyone was put on this planet for one purpose or whether a person gets to choose their path. This all started back in the middle of the bubble where we thought that we were so smart that we could take our success in training and turn our minds to anything we chose. We thought we could be anything, but used to talk most about politics (and Don even promised to get me elected as mayor of Beaverton) and religion (I'd like to get in on the ground floor of one of those "free love" cults : ). Of course, the bubble burst, giving of us perspective on just what part of the success was us and what part was the go-go economy. Now, most of us that used to have those conversations work at Microsoft as a place to keep doing fun work without traveling to globe trying to keep up our old standards of living. These days Don talks about all of us having a specific place in the world and that he's pretty darn sure that he's found his (and you should see the guy; he's in there, fighting for what he thinks is best for the platform and building quite an impressive reputation base to extend his influence wider and wider). He's also of a firm mind that I've found my place and that I should be a s/w guy of some kind for the rest of my life. So, I'm of two minds. On the one hand, I'm happy with the spot I've carved for myself in the Windows developer community and I think that there are plenty of fun s/w challenges to meet. Plus, my resume helps me get good gigs. On the other hand, I'm not a big fan of being "predestined" to anything. I don't like the idea that fate or even my inborn predilections decides what I do and don't do in my life. I also still think that I'm smart enough and flexible enough that I could start another career. My latest fantasies revolve around moving into a place that my wife could afford on her nurse's salary while I write novels and spend my afternoons filling the public education gap my kids are experiencing. Previous fantasies include getting my jurist doctor at Harvard and becoming a courtroom prosecutor on my way to being a judge (I always know what's best for everyone : ). Also, the equities market calls my name and I've got a little property investment business on the side that could use more attention. So, I've got plenty of things I'd like to dig into before I die that have nothing whatever to do with my background or training. In fact, I've got so many other things to try that Lutz was making fun of me just last night, "Haven't you noticed that everyone in 2004 wants a new career?" Still, should I stick with what's safe because I may never achieve in other industries what I've achieved in this one or should I roll the dice and takes my chances, knowing that life is pretty short to spend it all doing the safe, comfortable thing? Don't get me wrong; I'm not going anywhere just yet. I've started this Longhorn thing and I've got lots more to do there before I'm done. But I do think about hitting the reset button some day and starting over again from scratch. What do you guys think? Have any of you hit the reset button and ended up reading this post? Has anyone tried to escape from this industry only to end up back here and are happy they did? Does anything think that my hubris is going to get me into serious trouble? : ) On Behalf of Software Engineers, I'm SorrySunday, February 1st, 2004 I just got off the phone with my step-mother and boy are my arms tired. She way trying to do a mail merge. I told her about a month ago put data into an Excel spreadsheet in a data-like format (and I sent her an example spreadsheet to start from). Then, after entering the data into her spreadsheet, I recommended to her that she choose Mail Merge from the Tools menu in Word and she'd be home free. Of course, she wasn't. For example, after choosing her Excel spreadsheet, she was asked if she wanted to use first name, Sheet1$, Sheet2$ or Sheet3$ as her data. Having zero idea what SheetN$ was, she chose something vaguely human-sounding, which was exactly what she didn't want, then was frustrated when her data didn't come up. Later, after going away to buy hundreds of dollars worth of books (none of them telling her how to do Mail Merge using words that she could understand, btw), she opened up her document and was presented with a dialog box asking whether it was OK to run an SQL statement. "What's SQL?" she asked. "Nothing that any normal human should ever have to see," I replied, growing more embarrassed about the state of the output of my industry by the minute. Later, when we got the data working with the merge (Remote Assistance, even over a slow phone line to Fargo, ND, works *very* well, once I figured out how to take control of her computer [answer: Take Control in the upper left]), she turned her attention to reformatting her letter. For example, she'd pasted some text from the web, which, by default, left this weird web formatting instead of making it look like the rest of her letter, so the styles were very different. Luckily, selecting the text and turning off the bold was enough, otherwise I'd have either had to reformat her entire letter or talk her through doing it. And how did I tell her to turn off the bold? By selecting the text and pressing Ctrl+B? Why did I tell her that? Because Word had taken the Bold toolbar icon off the toolbar and I couldn't imagine describing to her what the little chevron was for so that she could get it back. I've listed only a small percentage of issues I worked through with her, but lest you think otherwise, my step-mom is no idiot. She's a nurse anesthetist, so has to keep tons of details in her head all day long or people die. Also, she's trained her dogs to win first place obstacle courses in competitions around the country, one of whom was said to be untrainable. But when it came to Mail Merge, she worked for three weekends straight before giving up and calling me. It's clear to me that for anything but the simplest of tasks that computers are not even close to ready for normal humans. On behalf of the software engineers everywhere, I'd like to apologize to Charlene (my step-mom) and the rest of the normal humans everything who are merely trying to make computers actually work. Hopefully Longhorn will fix this problem, but until then, I recommended that she return her computer to the manufacturer and get herself a Nintendo. After working through this with her for over an hour, I was only half kidding. What Would You Save If Your House Was On Fire?Saturday, January 31st, 2004 On a recent thread on my favorite mailing list ever, Jon Kale answers the question "what would you save if your house was on fire," which triggered my own thoughts along this line. Assuming I've already made sure that the humans and the pets were out of the house, I'd make sure to grab my Omega X-33 (purchased during the bubble, of course), but since I go almost nowhere without it, it's not likely to be burned up w/o its owner.
Often, when I want something comfortable to read, I'll scan the shelves 'til something pops out at me and re-read it. Also, when friends & family come to town, I often take them to Powell's City of Books and we play the "Top 5 Books of All Time" game, purchasing what they point out for me and writing their name in the book so that when I read it, I can talk about it with the recommender (man, I've gotten some wacky books that way...). Losing those books, especially the ones I haven't gotten to yet, would really hurt. On the other hand, because you never know when you're going to need to jam, my goal is to fit my entire set of positions on a memory hypercube (or whatever). But how do I back up the books when the atoms themselves are so satisfying? I mean, how can I recapture the feel of my leather-bound The Complete Frank Miller Batman, the back-pocket-worn The Silicon Mage, my copy of The Hobbit and The Lord of The Rings signed by my mother when I received my Master's Degree because she read them to me when I was 10 or the ancient copy of The Complete Sherlock Holmes given to me by my father and to him by his father? But even if I wanted a lossy digital backup of my books, how do I do it? I mean, I can scan all of my books and graphic novels, but only by destroying them. Why haven't books, which are produced in digital form, made the transition to electronic availability? Are we waiting for the Tablet PC to get to a point of ubiquity? So, in summary:
Betting on Longhorn-Only?Friday, January 30th, 2004 In response to my post yesterday (When In Doubt, Ignore Longhorn), Shaun asked whether he should be targeting Longhorn-only right now:
Here was my answer:
When In Doubt, Ignore LonghornThursday, January 29th, 2004 A guy walks into an exotic car dealer and asks the salesman the price of the fancy new Ferrari in the corner. The salesman looks at him with a sad look on his face, shakes his head and says, "I'm afraid, sir, that if you have to ask, you won't be able to afford it." If you're wondering whether you should be paying attention to the information on Longhorn that has appeared on the web and in the news lately, then you shouldn't be. Longhorn RTM is years away. This is the most lead time we've given on any Windows operating system ever. The reason we did it was so that we could get super early adopters to give us meaningful feedback while we still had enough of the development cycle left to make meaningful changes. If you're not a super early adopter, than Longhorn is just going to be noise that you should ignore 'til the beta hits. For day-to-day development, you should pay attention to .NET 1.1 news sources. For the near future, you'll want to listen for Whidbey, the next version of the .NET Framework, which should work on all supported OSes when it ships. Here are a list of my favorite news sources for current information and near future information: .NET Framework 1.x Information Sources:
That's not to say that Microsoft is going to stop talking about Longhorn in the WinFX newsgroups, on the Longhorn Developer Center and in blogs of all kinds. We do this so that those folks that can think about the distant future today have a chance to make their voices heard at a time when we can most take advantage of what they're saying. However, there continues to be more information than any human can consume on current Microsoft technologies, so don't be alarmed when you see something go by with Longhorn in the title; just ignore it until you think that Longhorn can help make your business more successful. That's why we're building it after all. : ) Surprised by Microsoft's OpennessFriday, January 9th, 2004 I get a lot of emails from folks surprised about how open Microsoft is being lately, mostly due to all of the blogging we've been doing lately (some of us started long before we ever became employees). However, even I was surprised in an internal blogging meeting today filled with a bunch of MS bloggers. During the meeting, we talked about a bunch of the benefits to MS and to our customers. Sara talked about how blogs are driving more traffic to MSDN than our own headlines. Robert described his "green, yellow, red" scale for determining whether to blog about something (believe it or not, he does decide not to sometimes : ). And then Adam Sohn from marketing talked about the need to police ourselves, describing some of the downsides in regards to blowing some group's launch plans or unconstructively criticizing another group. He preached caution when approaching the line between what was good for the customer and what was good for Microsoft. After listening to what I began to interpret as a message of self-censorship, I asked Adam a warm up, "Isn't it true that a lot of the stuff close to the 'line' is what our customers find most valuable?" He agreed that it was. And then I asked Adam my real question, "So, when we get close to that line, do we err on the side of our customer or ourselves?" Now, you have to remember that I've been a contributing member of the Windows development community for a lot of years. I've seen how aggressive Microsoft is in everything it does to always be on top. So when I asked on what side of the line I should come down, I fully expected to be told to keep the shareholders in mind. Of course, you know what his answer was or this story wouldn't have made it into my blog until after my tenure at MS was complete (or just before : ). He said, without hesitation, "Err on the side of the customer." That blew me away. Of course, I've been doing just that since before I became an MS employee and Robert rides the ragged edge all day long, but it was *very* nice to hear that guy with the PR and legal battle scars tell me to keep the customer first and foremost in my mind. Thanks, Adam. You've confirmed my decision to work at Microsoft. On Genghis, WinForms and How to Move Towards AvalonSaturday, January 3rd, 2004 Inspired by my pending interview of Don Box, Paolo Severini sent along an interview for me. Paul: Being a faithful reader of your books, articles and of your blog, I'd like to ask you a few questions about LH, Avalon and the future of WinForms. Before all, let me say that I'm really fascinated by Longhorn, and especially by Avalon. I installed the PDC stuff as soon as I received it through my MSDN subscription and I've begun exploring it with "pure geek" enthusiasm. Everything is extremely interesting, but I'm now not sure what to do with it. Chris: I know what you mean, Paul. I'm going through that myself. Suddenly having so many fewer barriers tends to throw off the engineer in me. I'm working through it by begging the Longhorn User Experience team for guidance, learning Adobe Illustrator, reading graphic design books and trying to open my mind to the graphic designer inside us all (I hope : ). Paul: Paraphrasing one of the questions you proposed to Don Box: what should a WinForms programmer *really* do today to prepare for Avalon? Chris: If you want to write code today that'll work well on Longhorn tomorrow, write WinForms today. WinForms in Whidbey gets tons more features and I expect they'll be some cool new Longhorn-specific stuff when the time is right. If, when you're preparing a Longhorn version of your application, you'd like to host Avalon controls from your WinForms app or even build Avalon apps that host your WinForms controls, you'll be able to do that in Longhorn via WinForms/Avalon interop. Chris: Me, too. Without this openness, I'd get into lots more trouble. : ) Paul: But I somehow also think that maybe LH was presented a bit too soon. Since it's not planned to be released before 2006, chances are that the shipped version could be significantly different. (Will it? Is it already? Can you write anything about that? :-). Chris: I used to think that we were unveiling Longhorn too soon, too. However, the later in the development process we get it out to reviewers, the fewer major changes we'll be able to make based of your feedback. What that means, of course, is that some major things are going to change between now and release, but those changes will be based on decisions that include feedback from you. The downside is that you'll have to relearn some of the things you learn with these bits. Hopefully, the upside is that most of what you have to unlearn will be replaced with something significantly better. Chris: I've already mentioned how well WinForms will work under Longhorn, so I think I've answered part of your question. However, you're asking something deeper here, i.e. when do I give up the old "way" that has more ubiquitous support for the new "way?" In this case, you're talking about .NET and Longhorn, but you could as easily be talking about DOS and Windows or Win32 and .NET. This is the eternal struggle and the reason that we need software engineers in the first place. As with all such questions, the answer is "it depends." My general purpose answer is to always pick the newest thing that meets my requirements. The newer the technology you pick, the longer the shelf life. Can I build cool, scalable apps that take advantage of the high resolution monitors and GPUs of tomorrow in DOS? Absolutely. Do I want to? Hell no. Can I do it in WinForms? Yes, although it'll still be harder than doing it on Avalon. Will I increase my available market by targeting DOS today? The answer used to be "yes," but for a while now it's been "no." What about WinForms? The answer is definitely "yes" today and will be for a while yet, even after Longhorn ships. The answer to the question of when to adopt new technology has too many variables for me to provide any general advice better than "as soon as possible." Of course, Microsoft wants the answer to that question to be "sooner rather than later," and we're working to make Longhorn kick-ass for developers, business users and consumers so that ubiquity is taken out of the equation as soon as possible. Please use all channels of communication you have into the company to help us make sure we're doing that. The WinFX newsgroups are one good place for such feedback. They are heavily monitored by all of the WinFX teams and the Longhorn User Experience (Aero) Team. Chris: Before I answer this question, I just wanted to point out that GDI is not part of the Avalon rendering path. Instead, Avalon is built on DirectX, which is built directly on the drivers. GDI is still supported, of course, but it's a parallel rending path to Avalon's. The answer to the core question, i.e. why not ship Avalon on XP, is one of resources. Chris Anderson once told me that something like a man millennia has gone into the development of Avalon thus far. Even if Chris was exaggerating for effect, that's still one hell of a lot of work. That work has gone into building an architecture that allows application developers to take advantage of features present all the way down to the hardware level, including changes at every point in the presentation stack. What kind of work do you think it would take to make a subset of that available under Windows XP? Or Windows 2000? Or Windows 98? What kind of work do you think it would take to support those features on those down-level operating systems in their subsetted states? If we're looking at a release years into the future already, how many more years are we willing to wait to release Avalon in a form that works in a subsetted form on those OSes? And what will we ship to our customers expected a new OS in the meantime? It may be that you could come up with answers that you love to these questions. Would our other customers answer them the same way? Would our shareholders answer them the same way? Would your answers best position us against our competitors? Even if you got a subset of Avalon that works across .NET platforms today, would it really enable you to be more successful at your business or is it an engineering "gosh that'd be neat?" I know that our product teams really listen to our customers these days, so if you've got specific scenarios that you need enabled to be successful, please let them know. Paul: Furthermore, if XAML is, in the end, only a way to glue together a graph of CLR objects, why don't use it also to build WinForms UI? Both these options would make the transition much easier. Now that's a question I can provide a more satisfactory answer to, I think (sorry about that last answer : ). In the Longhorn PDC bits today, you can generate WinForms apps using XAML for the very reason you state. Likewise, if you'd like to try a subset of XAML in today's version of the .NET Framework, there are not one, but two 3rd parties providing early access to projects to allow this to happen. Given the amount of work that has gone into, and will go into, getting Avalon out the door, I doubt very much that their versions of XAML will be full-featured, but it may help ease the transition, as you say. Chris: I'd say that it absolutely makes sense to continue to write WinForms applications for years to come. Not only in WinForms a great platform for client applications today, but in Whidbey, it about doubles in size and capability. Plus, WinForms applications will continue to work great under Longhorn and will form the core of an application that needs to take advantage of Longhorn features under Longhorn but continue to work on the rest of the .NET platform. Unless you are planning to target only Longhorn, WinForms is absolutely where you should be spending your client development effort today and for years to come. Chris: Windowless controls were meant mostly as an optimization when creating thousands of Window handles brought the platform to its knees. Some folks also used windowless controls as a good way to fake non-rectangular controls. In modern implementations of User32, neither is much of an issue, so windowless controls provide a service that is no longer required in most cases. In the specialized cases where it is still necessary, I find that building an aggregate control that does the drawing of multiple controls that you would have made windowless in the past solves most of my needs in this area, although your mileage may vary. Given that Genghis has most of the rest of the features that I wanted for it, but no windowless control architecture, I'd say that folks seem to agree with me that windowless controls are no longer as important as they once were. Chris: I was waiting for a wizard that would generate MDI, SDI and multi-SDI applications before shipping the next drop of Genghis, but there are enough new things and fixes that we should have another version of Genghis out in a week or so. If you or anyone would like to build the wizard (or just send Scott Densmore email begging him to finish the one he already started and has promised to me several times) that'd be great. Thanks for your wonderful job and for the time you dedicated to this mail. I just hope my English was understandable... :-) Best regards from Italy, Lending a Helping HandTuesday, December 23, 2003 I know this sounds like spam, but it's not -- it's from my Uncle Mark, who's also my godfather and the nicest man I've even known: Chris, I'm writing you to ask your help. My brother Tom was gravely ill. Tom is 55 years old, married with two grown sons. He needed both a liver and a kidney transplant. He just received his transplants. It was by the grace of God just in time as he was within 2 to 3 days of death. He is doing well with no signs of rejection and just some minor complications. Unfortunately, he is nearly bankrupt from all his medical bills. Tom's life has been marked by several challenges, many overcome through hard work and determination. He is a man of immense spirit and we all love him dearly. This is a challenge he can't face alone. As you can imagine, our family is very concerned. We pray a lot. We have also undertaken a benefit and raffles for him to help him with his expenses. Right now we're just trying to help him pay his mortgage and put food on his table. He hasn't been able to work for three months. He also faces a tremendous bill from the transplant that his health insurance won't pay. While I don't know my uncle's brother (his part of the family never really mixed with mine for some reason), because it's important to my uncle, I'll be purchasing one of each of the two kinds of raffle tickets, publicizing my uncle's plea on my web site, investigating Microsoft's matching for charity and, of course, sending my prayers. If any of you is interested in participating in the raffles, let Mark know directly. If you wanted to publicize this on your own web sites or donate something for the silent auction, let Mark know about that, too. Of course, all prayers are warming accepted. Thank you very much and have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. Learning to Learn, Part IISunday, November 30, 2003 Tony R. Kuphaldt, an instructor at Bellingham Technical College in Washington recently emailed me that my Learning to Learn piece spoke to him and pointed me to his web site where he provides a wonderful look at his own experiences in self-teaching. In this paper, Tony describes his insights, starting with an amazing look into my own previous field of employ: "Industry training, at least in its popular form, is roughly based on the model of a fire hydrant: sit in front of it, open the valve, and take a big drink. Due to time limitations, trainers present information at a rapid pace, with participants retaining only a fraction of what they see and hear. What knowledge they do gain seldom passes on to co-workers after the training session, and is forgotten almost as rapidly as it is presented, necessitating continual re-training. ... [Students] often leave with the impression of the instructor being something of a genius for being able to present so much information so quickly, and instilling within their own minds a sense of inferiority for not grasping all of it at the delivered pace."Further, Tony describes the technique I use to really learn something: "What did I do to learn? Simple: I would challenge my existing knowledge of a subject by trying to apply it to real-world conditions and/or thought experiments. If I didn't know enough about a topic to successfully apply it to a realistic problem, I would research and study until I did. If ever I was completely baffled by a problem, I could determine my own conceptual weaknesses by incrementally simplifying the problem until I could solve it. Whatever complexity I eliminated from the problem that enabled me to solve it was where my understanding was weak. Once I knew what I didn't know, I not only knew where to focus my study efforts, but I also felt more motivated to study because I could perceive my own needs."Tony characterizes his (and my) self-teaching technique as an internal feedback loop, where the student knows what he doesn't know. This is as opposed to an external feedback loop in an instructional setting, where the instructor knows what the student doesn't know, but the feedback loop is broken between the student and the instructor. And as if that weren't enough, Tony takes his goals on the road, as it were, testing a self-teaching-based curriculum on his students and reporting on his results. I find his work especially interesting not because I feel the need to teach the world to teach themselves; I'm perfectly happy to encourage folks to learn to learn, but to have them choose other techniques. However, I do feel very strongly that the Sells brothers learn to learn. I can't imagine sending them out into the world without a firm grasp of the ability to teach themselves. I don't know how to do that, though, unless I start home schooling them. That wouldn't be out of the question except for this unhealthy addiction I have to a steady income stream... The Wonder that is XAML's Extended Attribute SyntaxSaturday, November 29, 2003 I've been playing with GridPanel today and really like how elegant it is. If I say the following: <GridPanel> <SimpleText>Testing</SimpleText> <SimpleText>1</SimpleText> <SimpleText>2</SimpleText> <SimpleText>3</SimpleText> </GridPanel> I get the equivalent of an HTML table with four rows with each SimpleText element forming a cell like so (augmented with Border elements not shown above to accentuate the cells):
If I want to split the data into columns, I can do that using the Columns attribute: <GridPanel Columns="2"> <SimpleText>Testing</SimpleText> <SimpleText>1</SimpleText> <SimpleText>2</SimpleText> <SimpleText>3</SimpleText> </GridPanel> Which gives me two rows of two columns each:
That's all nice and simple, but still flexible. For example, if I want to set the Testing string to cover two columns, I can give it an ID in the XAML and call the GridPanel.SetColumnSpan static method in code, e.g. when the Window loads: <!-- xaml -->
<Window ... Loaded="window1_Loaded">
<GridPanel Columns="2">
<SimpleText ID="testingSimpleText">Testing</SimpleText>
<SimpleText>1</SimpleText>
<SimpleText>2</SimpleText>
<SimpleText>3</SimpleText>
</GridPanel>
</Window>
// C#
void window1_Loaded(...) {
GridPanel.SetColumnSpan(testingSimpleText, 2);
}This code yields 3 rows arranged as follows:
This is all fine and makes you appreciate the elegance of the GridPanel. However, that's not what inspired me to write this entry. Remember that the SimpleText element serves as a cell in the GridPanel. Even better, the SimpleText element doesn't know it's serving as a cell in a GridPanel. The architecture of Avalon is loosely-couple so that all of the elements don't need to have intimate knowledge of each other. This loose coupling is really great for future elements that some developer wants to host in a GridPanel or that want to host SimpleText elements. Still, I'd like to be able to set GridPanel-related properties for each "cell" on the cell element itself, even if the cell element doesn't know it's a child of a GridPanel. And that's what the extended attribute syntax in XAML lets me do. Instead of writing the code, I can just do this: <GridPanel Columns="2"> <SimpleText GridPanel.ColumnSpan="2">Testing</SimpleText> <SimpleText>1</SimpleText> <SimpleText>2</SimpleText> <SimpleText>3</SimpleText> </GridPanel> This dotted attribute syntax allows me to set a GridPanel setting for the SimpleText element w/o any knowledge from the GridPanel of the SimpleText or vice versa. That means that if I define the FooBar element tomorrow, I can set it's GridPanel.ColumnSpan on it when it's used inside a GridPanel w/o extending GridPanel. This also means that if FooBar has a Quux per-child property, I can set the FooBar.Quux attribute of the SimpleText element w/o extending SimpleText. Nice! BTW, if you'd like to see the code that provides the GridPanel in "outline mode" as above, it looks like this: <Border Background="black" Width="100%" Height="100%">
<GridPanel Columns="2">
<Border Background="white" GridPanel.ColumnSpan="2">
<SimpleText >Testing</SimpleText>
</Border>
<Border Background="white">
<SimpleText>1</SimpleText>
</Border>
<Border Background="white">
<SimpleText>2</SimpleText>
</Border>
<Border Background="white">
<SimpleText>3</SimpleText>
</Border>
</GridPanel>
</Border>Notice that the GridPanel.ColumnSpan is on the Border element, not the SimpleText element. That's because it's the Border that's the cell of the GridPanel, not the SimpleText. I don't know UIs, but I know what I like...Monday, November 24, 2003 The user in me sees Longhorn and dreams of software without limits. The engineer in me sees Longhorn and is scared of software without limits. An engineer's days are defined by requirements and restrictions. Those restrictions come not only from the capabilities of the tools and technologies being bolted together, but also accepted practice. For years, I've been comfortable designing "rich" client applications because a) my tools and technologies haven't let me do much that was really "rich" and b) because "rich" was pre-defined by existing applications. In fact, when I started programming Windows 3.1, I adopted a single 3-step UI design process:
It doesn't take much to design an application that looks like this:  or even one that looks like this:  when the process is merely aping existing apps. I was even encouraged to use this kind of UI design by books with color pictures from well respected authors:
When the web came along, things were scary because all the guidelines were gone. However, at first the limitations were strict, so I didn't have any trouble building sites that looked like this:
but when a few years later, the limitations faded away and I was expected to conceive of and implement stuff like this:
I didn't have a clue. Luckily, the web "way" settled down over the years so that we figured out basically how to design web sites:
Plus, limitations took hold as we realized that you could build pretty much anything you wanted unless you wanted it to work on someone's machine besides yours, which turned the screws down pretty tightly. Still, while the emerging conventions helped me figure out what I wanted my own web site to look like in general, I had to *pay* for help from a otherly-skilled professional before I could get the specifics:
This is where it got scary until I had the one application designed for which I would ever need a designer. With my web site out of the way, it was smooth sailing. That is, until Longhorn and Avalon came along. Avalon drops the bottom out of the limitations and the guidelines again, leaving guys like me in a lurch. Oh sure, I've done pretty much everything there is to do in this industry, from coder to President, from docs to QA, from project management to *shudder* marketing. However, what I haven't done and always hoped to avoid was design the graphics that go along with an application. Those were always things that I could hire done, most often as a deductible expense. But now what do I do? MS doesn't provide MSDN authors a "graphic artist" budget. We do have very talented graphic artists at MSDN, but what's my boss going to say when they're swamped doing graphics for my pet projects and not the public-facing web site? And standard bitmap graphic artifacts aren't enough; I need *vector* graphics. Even I can see that while this is fine:
nobody is expanding sol.exe's main window to get more "green space":
To solve problems like these, we need vector graphics that look good when they're scaled, which I understand is roughly 10x harder than bitmaps (which are already beyond me). But just the graphics aren't enough, either. MS is busy redesigning the Windows "user experience" to include the best of Windows and the web:
Apps are supposed to behavior sensibly (which I can handle) *and* look cool (where do I learn to make *that* happen?!?). In fact, taking the next step from the budding UX guidelines, we seem to be heading into a place where if I want to build my own sol to fix the scaling, I'll be trying to fit a "menu system" on the front like the gaming guys do:
and like so:
In fact, I've heard tell that there's a special guy that designs these pre-game antics separately from the rest of the game just so folks think the game is cool as soon as it starts, long before you're actually playing it. How can I stand up to that kind of pressure? I was pretty damn happy with myself when I made blocks fall and stack:
And while this is the only scalable game of its kind of which I know (I was ready for Avalon a while ago, apparently : ), it still has the standard un-cool "menu system" that Windows comes with out of the box. And there's no relief in sight! Avalon, by taking advantage of 3D hardware and displays that haven't even been invented yet, along with intrinsic support for every kind of media and animation that I'm familiar with, blows right by the limitations we've grown to know and love in Windows and web applications. Now we're into the world of game programmers, where if you can imagine it, you can do it. But where am I going to get the graphics for what I can imagine? How do I imagine a user experience when MS is literally still writing the book on it and they haven't shipped a Longhorn Visual Studio, Word *or* Outlook? Graphic/user experience designers of the world, please be gentle; the engineers are spooked and could stampede at any moment... Know where I can get some graphics/user experience designers cheap? My First Meeting with BillG's Technical AdvisorSaturday, November 15, 2003 In my continuing quest to take advantage of unique experiences at Microsoft for those that aren't able to, I spent an hour in a meeting with Bill Gates's Technical Advisor, Alexander Gounares, earlier this week. Among other things, Alex is responsible for getting answers when Bill asks questions like "Hey, what are we doing about adding air conditioning to Windows?" I've had meetings with senior execs at MS before and I always end up saying stuff that upsets them. This time, the guy was so nice, I just wanted to nod my head and do whatever he asked of me. In fact, the thing I volunteered to work on (a "vision" whitepaper exploring a new application of technology that's still under development) wasn't so much that he asked me to do it, but rather because he asked for a volunteer and made eye contact with me in such a heart-warming way that I couldn't say no. (Of course, my boss kicking me under the table didn't hurt, either... : ) BTW, in case you wondered, while the Sr. VP I upset knew me from my blog, Alex didn't know me from Adam. : ) For folks keeping track, in my six month career at MS, I gotten to do *lots* of cool stuff:
I list these not to brag, but to reflect on how many cool things there are to do at MS. I assume it's all down hill from here. : ) Time For An Exciting Career In ElectronicsMonday, November 3, 2003 Depending on how you look at it, what I'm best at in the whole world has either become completely unnecessary or incredibly easy. The skill that I spent most of the last 10 years learning was to look at a group of types, APIs, reference docs, headers, source code, etc., distill it down to a set of architectural intentions and then to weave a story through the whole thing to make sense of it for developers that weren't able to glean the intensions themselves (most often because they had real jobs). I call this exhaustive search for intention officially at an end. I'm no longer needed except as a gatherer for those not yet facile in RSS aggregators (which, luckily for me, is still a large number : ). Blogs like Chris's, Scott's and Raymond's go way beyond the "what" that docs and web sites and even mailing lists/newsgroups/web forums have typically stuck with and gone right into the "why." And not only that, but Chris is actually taking that next step on his blog. In the old days, before my favorite technology company became so damn open, if I wanted to comment on something, I had to painstakingly track down the right people at Microsoft, make friends with them (which first demanded that I learn social skills) and then convince them that someone outside of MS might actually have something intelligent and useful to say. This often involved years of stalking 'softies in mailing lists and conference halls and now Chris is letting anyone give him feedback to which he actually listens! What use a hack like me that doesn't invent something, but merely figures out how existing things work so that I can tell someone about it if the guy that invents it does that part, too?!? I wonder if there are slots left in the vocational technical school near my house... In Search of ExpertiseMonday, November 3, 2003 I had an interesting insight while watching Episode II: Attack of the Clones (I had a hankering to see Yoda kick some butt, OK?!?). The definition of expert is someone that just does whatever it is they do; they don't think about it. Everyone else is just learning. What drove this home for me was when Anakin heard of his mother being taken and how everyone else had failed or died looking for her, Anakin started out after her without any planning whatsoever. *That's* an expert. Of course, he had The Force and the rest of us have to live with an average amount of midichlorian, but he'd done what I've seen other experts do, too: unconscious competence. The reason that this is such an insight for me is that for my entire life, I've always felt that there were special people in the world that just know what they're doing. These people worked in companies or were members of a profession and by their association with those organizations, I felt that they must be experts. I mean, how could someone be a member of professional for any length of time and not strive for mastery of the professional? It was watching Anakin that it finally sunk in that mere association is not enough; most organizations, no matter how high their standards, do not stop non-experts at the door. Experts are the ones inside the organizations that rise to the top, that stand out, that set examples for other members. Expertise is the thing that separates a moderately smart person studying up on a topic for a while from someone that really understands something down to their bones. This is what separates me catching up to my financial advisor after 6 months of study from a *real* money manager. That's what separates a new computer science graduate from me. That's not to say that I couldn't be better than some "real" money managers one day or that the new college grad couldn't be better then me on day one. What it does say, however, is that encountering a true expert is a rare thing. Because of that rarity, I believe that most reasonably intelligent people can, with study and practice, get good at practically anything that they set their mind to. This means that I can, with a reasonable amount of study and practice, check the work of my financial advisor or my accountant or a plumbing contractor and come up with things that they don't. I know that this is true because I've done it (not with the plumbing though, I'm practically clueless there : ). The amount of study I needed to catch up with my professional service provider doesn't make me an expert, of course, because it's highly unlikely that either of them is an expert. So, now that I've settled the question of whether membership in a profession makes one an expert (it doesn't), that leaves two questions:
Comments on my continued quest for expertise welcome. My First PDC as a MicrosoftieMonday, November 3, 2003 After all the preparation, planning and sheer work, it's a letdown for the PDC to actually be over. It was an amazing experience for me to be "back stage" at a PDC, the only conference I'd spent my own money on for years (although as a speaker, they let me in gratis this year : ). Things I Heard:As a Microsoft employee, my job is to listen and take feedback home. Here's what I heard:
Things I Got To Do:Also, as a first timer backstage at the PDC (and a long-time member of the Windows developer community), I got to do all kinds of fun things:
At this PDC, I definitely got to see how the sausage was made, but that still didn't take away from the deep, rich flavor. Recommend. How Does One Obtain "Inside" Information?Wednesday, October 15, 2003 I got an email today from John Reilly today asking me a question I get from time to time:
Now that I'm a Microsoft employee, I have access to not only the source for most of what I'm researching, but the architects and internal mailing lists populated by the developers on the project, so that really is "inside information." However, over the 8+ years that I was a contributing member of the Windows developer community, 99% of what I've done has not been based on inside information. So, before I had access to internal info, how did I figure stuff out if the docs don't answer my questions? I do the following, in order of decreasing frequency:
What Is An RSS Feed?Thursday, October 9, 2003 As a deadline nears and I spend an increasing amount of time avoiding the work I should be doing, I find a finance geek acquaintance of mine asking what an RSS feed is after I implored him to add one to his web site. This is a 20-year old that's owned stock since he was 11, read 12,000 company reports in 2002, earned 155% on his money is the last 11 months and recently been given his own $35M mutual fund to manage (becoming the youngest ever mutual fund manager). If this guy doesn't know what an RSS feed is, then I'm guessing at least some of my readers don't know either (yes, I'm talking to you, Mom). When he asked me what an RSS feed was, this is what I told him: An RSS feed is a thing of pure beauty. If you've ever been to a web site with an orange XML or RSS button, clicking it will yield a page that looks something like this: <?xml version="1.0" ?> <rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:slash="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/slash/" xmlns:wfw="http://wellformedweb.org/CommentAPI/">
</rss> While RSS is fairly unreadable for normal humans, computers eat it up. For example, if you read the RSS feed from my site on a regular basis, whenever I make a new post, you'll see a new entry in the RSS feed. RSS feeds aren't useful for you, but when fed to an "RSS reader" program, you can keep up to date on literally hundreds of web sites without having to browse to them manually. The RSS reader will check each RSS feed to which you subscribe, letting you know when something new on a web site has happened and showing you what it is, giving you the option to follow up or ignore the new thing. Thousands of sites have RSS feeds, letting me keep up on a bunch of things:
I keep up on all of this without ever visiting the web sites themselves them 'til something of interest catches my eye. There are a bunch of RSS readers in the world, but my favorite is SharpReader. If you install this program and start it up, SR will check all of the RSS feeds that you subscribe to on a regular basis in the background while you work, notifying you of something new by changing it's icon from blue to yellow. If you decide to install SharpReader, your next stop should be NewsIsFree.com, where you'll find all kinds of RSS feeds in any number of categories. After subscribing to a few of those, you'll want to stop by Tapestry, where you can find RSS feeds for tons of daily comic strips. If you want to get fancy, you can go to GoogleAlert, where you can subscribe to searches so that whenever Google finds something new on your search topic, your RSS reader will let you know. If you find the ability to track hundreds of web sites without surfing to each of them manually, RSS is for you. If you find my instructions intimidating, ask a computer friend to help you out (I'll be home for Christmas, Mom). My 9-Year Old Has a Cell PhoneFriday, October 3, 2003 Tonight is Friday night, which means the Sells family generally has pizza and a movie at home. However, since we've been through most of Blockbuster's catalog and the boys aren't quite old enough for most of my DVD collection (9 is a tad young for things like Fight Club...), we thought we'd take in the new Jack Black movie School of Rock. Kids-in-Mind.com gives it a 3.3.3, heavy on the poop jokes (which my sons like) and heavy on the irreverence (which I like), so it seemed like a winner. However, as most movies start between 7-7:30pm and I just noticed it was 6:30p but Melissa wasn't home with the boys, I started the calling. First was her cell, but I remember her telling me it was out of batteries. Then it was her sister's house, where she had been, but she had left for a friend's. Then the friend, but no answer. And then I remembered my son and his cell phone. My son is 9 years old. He's been into computers and gadgets of all kinds since before he was 3. A few months ago, he was digging around and found my old Nokia cell phone. It had some cool games, so he charged it up and started carrying it around with him. Then, he wanted minutes so he could make his own calls. So we finally found our way to the local AT&T wireless place (which wasn't really very local at all) and he spent his allowance money on pre-paid minutes ($10 for 20 minutes). After less than a week, he was down to 8 minutes left. He's most just calling his friends from our car (where I have my cell in my pocket w/o unlimited monthly minutes) or from our house (where we don't have long distance, but we do still have a land line), but it's his phone and his money and it gives him pleasure. It did, however, freak my wife out. "A 9-year old doesn't need a cell phone!" she'd say. I'd explain that it was his own money. "A 9-year old doesn't need a cell phone! Drug dealers have cell phones!" She and I both have our own cell phones and besides the occasional glass of wine, we don't even *use* drugs, let alone *sell* them. And while no amount of reasoning with her stopped her from being upset, she didn't say he couldn't have a cell phone, so now he does. That he keeps charged. And that he carries. And that he spends his own money on minutes for. And that I just called because he was with his mother: "Hello?" said my 9-year-old son on his very own cell phone, surprised but pleased to get a call. "Can I talk to your mother?" "Sure." "Hello. Sorry. My cell phone ran out of batteries," she said. "Aren't you glad that John has a cell phone?" I asked, not bothering to keep the smug out of my voice. "Hmphf," she said, not bothering to keep the annoyed out of hers. I think I may pay for his next batch of minutes just so I can keep calling her on his phone. : ) Google is Scary Smart, or Just Scary...Saturday, September 13, 2003 When I was a kid, the source of universal knowledge at home was the set of dusty encyclopedias that my Mom inherited from somewhere. Today, it's the Internet, via Google. That in itself makes Google the fulfillment of most sci-fi novels' description of the the-store-of-all-human knowledge (I wish the text of all books were up, but that'll happen in time...). Respect for MarketingFriday, September 12, 2003 Even in my short time at Microsoft so far, I've have already learned a *ton* from marketing. Of course, I'm working with lots of marketing folks as we get closer to the PDC. Because of my role, I have to worry about what's good for the developer. Marketing guys, on the other hand, have to balance that with what's good for the administrator, what's good for the user, what's good for the company, what's good for the shareholders and what's good for a bunch of other folks I don't even know about. And, they have to do it for all of the streams of information coming out of the company, which now includes lots of informal streams like newsgroups, message boards, user group talks and blogs. Anyone that can balance all of these folks and still get developers what they need has my unabashed respect. Let us pause on 9/11...Thursday, September 11, 2003 My 8-year old was proud to remind me that today was the two-year anniversary of 9/11. I was surprised that he knew and grateful to his school for taking the time to discuss it. He then went on to tell me how cool he thought the explosions were, which left me less pleased with his school. When I told him about my own experiences that day and how many people died, it immediately took all of the "coolness" right out of the day for him. "Let us pause on 9/11 to remember and honor the thousands killed, maimed, put out of work, and traumatized two years ago; also to honor the heroic, living and dead, who rose to the occasion on that terrible day. May God rest their souls and keep and protect their loved ones. May God also keep and protect our men and women serving here and abroad. Yes, there is much difference of opinion about what's happening in the world today; nevertheless, I think we all support the men and women of our armed forces and wish them a safe return home. They sacrifice a lot to serve their country." Personally, I try very hard not to let the terrorists get to me. Unfortunately, they have. Even time I get the anal probe treatment at the airport or a personal freedom is taken away by the Patriot Act or my sister-in-law is afraid to fly (and flat out refuses to fly on that day), they win. More subtly, ever time a US politician uses "terrorism" to push their own agenda, they also win. Please don't let them win. Have courage. Try to understand what it was that drove them to terrorism to attract our attention. Compare their lives to ours. But don't let them win. Don't let them take the right to the pursuit of happiness out of our lives. "Your enquiries frustrate the hell out of me"Friday, September 5, 2003 I would classify my style of communication as "get to conflict sooner rather than later." A radio DJ once classified engineering abilities as a series of personality flaws that are accidentally useful in today's IT industry and, arguably, he's right. For most folks that have to work with me, it's generally hard at first, but eventually you either love me or hate me (and I continuously work to tip that percentage towards the former : ). However, it's the rare individual that can see past someone's personal communications style and still pull out the value. Alan Cooper is one such person. I was reading one of his books and was so lost that I called and blamed him and his parents. He straightened me out by letting politely me know that he book wasn't even trying to solve my problems and therefore it's not surprising that it didn't. Further, he ended his email like this: "PS. Your enquiries frustrate the hell out of me. That's why they are good and I want you to keep making them. If I growl at you, well, that's my problem. Not yours." I don't know if other people would appreciate Alan encouraging my behavior, but it's still cool to know that such tolerance exists in the world. : ) Communication Is AllMonday, September 1, 2003 It's amazing to me the number of problems that can be solved or avoided completely with communication. For example, the prevailing attitude of the day is that children should not be let out of an adult's sight, in spite of an all-time low in the history of violent crime. Towards that end, and since tomorrow is the first day of school, my oldest boy is currently testing the range of our walkie-talkies to see if he and his younger brother can walk to school. The reason? Because I can communicate with him to know that they got to school OK. I need that communication so that I can continue to be paranoid while still letting him walk the half-mile to school. Here's another example: Recently at work there was a minor fracas when group A published their planned work based on group B's input aka *implicit* buy-in, but without group B's *explicit* buy-in. This made group B unhappy, because they felt that their input wasn't been taken (even though it was). The solution? Group A set up a regular meeting to communicate on their various projects with group B, making sure to get everyone's buy-in explicitly. Here's another one: My co-author on the VB version of my WinForms book has been working like a dog on his new job and his new baby and the VB port of my book. However, since most of his communications were with the publishing company directly, I didn't see most of the work that he was doing and, because of our tight schedule, that caused me to worry that we wouldn't make it. The solution? I asked him about it and he told me of the pile of work he'd done that I didn't know about. He also volunteered to make sure to cc me on all of his email related to the book. And here's my favorite example: For a long, long time, MS was labeled (and is often still labeled) as an "evil" because of a perceived uncaring about developer's hopes and dreams. Ironically, with a software engineer at the helm, all of Microsoft's decisions are driven by that need to meet the needs of 3rd party developers. The issue was communication, both in letting internal folks make their intentions known to the external folks and in getting the hopes and dreams of external folks into the planning processes of internal folks. It's my belief that the reason that Adam, Becky, Brad, Brian, Chris, Chris, Don, Duncan, Ed, Eric, Kent, Lutz, Martin, Sara, Scott, Tommy, and tons of other MS employees are not only not reprimanded for our blog posts, but encouraged, is so that our intentions can be known to external folks. And believe me, when someone external puts a substantive comment into their blog and one of the thousands of MS employees finds it, it makes its way into the inboxes of the internal MS employees that use that feedback. This need for bi-directional communication between internal and external folks at MS has driven all kinds of new ways of doing things and you're going to see a whole lot more of that at the PDC. I could keep going on for days about problems in my life that are solved with communication and could have been avoided with communication up front. In fact, I'm started to get a feel for it when I realize that my communication could have been better and what problem I'm going to have because it wasn't. Also, I've recently started to try to really concentrate on what my friends and family are saying when they start conversations with me while I'm working. (Previously I would continue working, giving a grunt now and again, as necessary.) This little thing has made a big difference. Of course, lots of folks way smarter than I already know this stuff, but to a geek who only learned how to communicate with other humans relatively recently, this is deep thinking! BTW, don't tell my sister-in-law with the Master's degree in communications. We give each other crap all the time on any number of topics and the idea that she knows more about what's really important in the world would give her all kinds of extra ammunition (which she rarely needs anyway... : ) Buffering .NET Console OutputTuesday, August 19, 2003 Doing some ad hoc benchmarks, I found that my compute/IO intensive program was significantly slower in .NET than in native C++ (here's a more rigorous test showing the same thing). However, when the IO was taken out (Console.Write), the test showed that the computation in .NET and in native C++ was nearly the same (with C++ still having a slight edge). My .NET IO code looked like this: static void OutputIt(int[] vect) { In tracking down this disparity, Courteney van den Berg noticed that, unlike STL IO streams in native C++, .NET Console output is not buffered. A simple manual buffering using a StringBuilder brings the performance of .NET back in line with native C++: static void OutputIt(int[] vect) { Instead of buffering manually, I could have turned on buffered console IO by reopening console output with a buffer size: static void Main(string[] args) { // Console output now buffered Why isn't Console output buffered by default? Unlike in C++, which has deterministic finalization, in .NET, console output would have to be manually flushed or closed (closing causes a flush). Failure to do so can cause console output to be incomplete at the end of a program. Notice our careful use of the "using" block in the code above, causing the output stream to be closed at the end of the block and the remaining buffered output to be flushed, even in the face of exceptions. Forgetting to use the "using" block or forgetting to manually flush or close in a finally block, can cause console output to be lost. Rather than imposing the new burden of manually closing the console output, .NET architects opted to turn off buffering by default, while still letting you turn it on at will. The real goals of marketing?Friday, August 15, 2003 I've long lamented that I have no clue what the basics of marketing are and therefore I've been at the mercy of actual marketing people whose skill I can't judge. In fact, I so miss this important knowledge in my life that I interviewed for a marketing job at Microsoft (although I was in no danger of getting it). A *long* time friend of mine, Dave Stroble, said that I was too "customer-focused" to be in marketing, anyway, and I should be glad I'm not in that field. When I asked how that could be (isn't customer focus the core of marketing?), he went on to say the following: "Marketing is not about giving the customer what he wants, or even finding out what the customer wants and trying to get engineering to create it. It's about trying to sell the customer what you already have -- whether that's product, talent, or pre-conceived notions. If the needs of a customer occasionally overlap with an actual product, that's merely random coincidence. While I find this cleverly stated (even though I'm nowhere near too sexy for girls : ), I sure hope this isn't the real goal of marketing. My hope is that it's about taking a solution and letting folks that have the matching problem know so that you can trade your solution for their money and both consider yourselves lucky. Is this a naive view? Anyone with real marketing training want to chime in on the real goals of marketing? I'm no heroTuesday, August 12, 2003 In yesterday's post, I did not mean to imply that I was some kind of internal David against the MS Goliath. I am in the majority of employees when I say that I want to keep in mind what's best for the customer. The only issues, really, are what is best for the customer and how can those needs be met within the limits of our resources. We do spend quite a bit of time arguing over those, however. : ) I speak for the treesMonday, August 11, 2003 After a few weeks at Microsoft, when I was feeling particularly frazzled with my work and travel schedule, Peter Drayton pulled me aside to reinforce what I'd heard before: the first 6 months at MS suck for everyone; after that, you either hate it forever or you can't ever imagine working anywhere else. At that point in my budding MS career, I was leaning towards the former. Peter, having been there, said that he'd gotten a piece of advice that had seen him through. The advice was simple: have an agenda. The idea is, no matter what projects you work on, no matter what groups you go to, no matter what tasks you're into that day, to have an underlying agenda that pushes you forward and drives your decisions. Businesses call such a thing a "vision statement." Authors call it a "story." Whatever you call it, it's always helpful to have one and here's mine: "Remember what it's like to not work at Microsoft." That's it. That's my goal. Of course, as with all things, Dr. Seuss says it better than I can: "I am the Lorax. I speak for the trees. I speak for the trees, for the trees have no tongues."I consider it my mission to speak for the thousands of developers that I've known and talked to over the years that have no tongue inside Microsoft. This came up just this morning on the phone with a colleague of mine at MS. He said, "We need to maintain the value of X." I replied, "I don't care about the value of X. I care about enabling our customers to get the most out of our products." Of course, there are hundreds of people concerned with X inside of MS and they would be less than happy that I'd dismissed the value of it, but that didn't matter to me. What mattered was being the kind of developer advocate inside of MS that had helped me when I wasn't there and to be a constant reminder to my colleagues of the needs of those folks. Since MS was founded by developers and run by developers (which has its pros and cons), I plan on being more successful than the Lorax.Positive AffirmationSunday, August 3, 2003 I woke up at Don's house one day last week utterly convinced that I was going to win the lottery that day. It was 6:30a, which is early for me, but I had an 8a meeting (*very* early for Microsofties), so I had set the alarm. Tim, who was also staying at Don's that week and with whom I was sharing a room (separate beds : ) was on Eastern time, so had already accidently woken me at 6a that morning on his way to the door (it's not his fault; I'm too long for the bed and it's a tight squeeze to get past me when I'm I'm in it). I must've had some strong dream between 6a and 6:30a as I lay there in and out of sleep. The premonition was so strong that I recalled the epilog from one of the first non-comic Dilbert books in which Scott Adams talked about his belief that there were multiple parallel universi and that by process of positive affirmations, he'd moved his consciousness into one that had attained great success in spite of his abysmal drawing abilities (this was before his TV series was canceled). So, all morning, in classic positive affirmation style, I had "I will win the lottery today" running through my head. It swamped all other thoughts, except those of whether I wanted the annual payment or the lump sum ($25M or $13M, respectively) and how I was going to spend the money. My first purchase was to be a two-week trip for my entire extended family to Hawaii where we would decide how rest of the money was to be spent. The idea was to devise a plan wherein every adult member of my family could get a life-changing amount of money, e.g. $100K, to use to follow their dreams, but awarded only in a manner that wouldn't actually cause more harm than good (as large sums of money can do [or so I've heard...]). Then, I called my sister-in-law to ask her where, money being no object, she would want to live. I've been looking for houses in her neighborhood lately so that we could be closer ("It takes a village to raise a child."). Right away, she was suspicious of my question, "Why? Are you going to win the lottery?" "Yes," I said, confidently. "Really? How do you know?" "I woke up with a 'feeling,'" I said, unashamed. "How often have you had these feelings and they've come true?" she asked, judging her odds. "Never." "Oh," she said, disappointedly. "No. I mean, I've never had a feeling like this before," I corrected her. "Oh," she said, this time more excited. I've also loved that about my sister-in-law. She's very open-minded. She never once questioned my sanity (out loud), but instead started planning where she wanted to live. Her conclusion is that she'd want a nicer house very close to where she currently live, but basically, that was all. "I like my life," she said. That was my conclusion as well. I have things that I want to do that aren't likely to generate an income stream, e.g. figure out how money works, but my life is a good one and doesn't need major changes. It was fun to go through the mental exercise and I would certainly have been happy to win the lottery that day, but it's OK that I didn't. That early morning feeling lead to positive affirmation of a different kind. No huggy, no kissy, until I get an RSS feedSunday, August 3, 2003 Before RSS took over, I had a folder named "Daily" which had links to all of the URLs that I surfed to on a daily basis. One problem was that for the sites that changed daily, it was a pain to decide what was new. An even bigger problem was the ones that didn't change daily. Eventually, the pain of surfing to them daily was outweighed by the pleasure I would get when those sites were finally updated. A bunch of my friends' infrequently updated blogs fall into this category (you know who you are : ). Sure, RSS is useful to track Scoble as he shirks his moving duties, but even more useful to track Tim when he eventually does update his blog. With RSS, I don't have to experience any pain surfing to Tim's blog day after day. Instead, I let SharpReader poll Tim's blog and when it's finally updated, I'll know about it. All gain; no pain. What that means, unfortunately, is that I only read blogs with RSS feeds, because I've long ago gotten out of the habit of surfing my "Daily" folder. So when Josh Trupin (editor of MSDN Magazine) gave his reasons for being out of the office on Monday, he had to send me an email with a link to the description of his horrific train injury detailed on his blog. As fun a writer as Josh is, I won't go back (unless Google brings me there) 'til he's got an RSS feed. I've been hurt before; now I'm older and wiser and require an RSS feed before I'm willing to wed myself to a blog. My First .NET ShowMonday, July 28, 2003 In many ways, my list of "My First" articles lately have been written out of duty to all of the developers that have always wanted to work at Microsoft, but haven't yet been able to. I first applied for a job @ MS as a summer intern in 1988. I was turned down while another guy down the hall of my fraternity was accepted. He spent all summer building LCD panels into one giant screen and I spent all summer writing FoxPro code. I wonder if he still works here. I can't for the life of me remember his name. David something... Anyway, every time some new, fun, cool opportunity comes up, I feel like I have to take it just so that I can share it with the folks that don't yet work here (seems like they're hiring everyone, though, so it shouldn't be much longer : ). This time, I got to be in an episode of the .NET Show. I was to be 15 minutes of code demo after Brad Abrams and Anders Hejlsberg reminded folks that .NET wasn't just about web services. There were all kinds of folks that Robert had on tap to give the demo, but they were all busy, so eventually they got to the last monkey in the barrel and had to settle for me. : ) I flew up this morning and had to call MS information: "Hi, I'm a Microsoft employee, but I'm new. Can you tell me where to go to get the MS Studios?" This in spite of the fact that I'd been there less than two weeks before! (I'm terrible at remembering anything that doesn't have a lot of parenthesis and braces in it). They showed me to Green Room #2, where they had some food waiting, just like I was a real "talent". Maybe the food was really for Brad and Anders. Maybe the food was for Nick Hodapp, Project Manager for Visual C++, who was in the makeup chair when I arrived. Nick was there to remind people that MS is serious about C++ both in the native and managed spaces and to show off the port of Quake II to managed C++. While I waited my turn in the makeup chair, I watched Brad and Anders do their thing and made sure my demos worked. I was amazed that Robert never stopped the shooting while he did his interview. He did the whole thing in one take, which puts quite a burden on me to get my demo right the first time! I also spent some time eating the Green Room food, IMing my wife (she said to make sure not to use too much blue eye shadow or I'd look "trashy") and giving the makeup artist a talk on the benefits of Wi-Fi (she asked, honest!). After Brad and Anders were through, they wandered into my makeup session. I've always wanted to meet the creator of C#, but not while having my eyes done... Anyway, Brad and Anders were having a debate about the merits of a new optimization of the .NET framework and it was really cool to see how practical Anders was. I don't know why, but I imagined a guy that could come up with something as clean and simple as C# to be pretty academic. That wasn't the case at all. His view of the debate was that he wanted to see a few uses of a proposed new feature before he even thought about including it, as opposed to judging it on the basis of it's "coolness" as can happen when engineers gather together in groups. That brief chat made me feel better about having him in charge of my favorite programming language. After having just the right amount of blue eye shadow, I sat up on stage with Robert and Nick and my new friend Bob, who ran the entire shoot. He was like the voice of God, being only heard and not seen from his control room in the bowels of MS Studio. He and I bonded quickly as we settled into the banter of trading insults familiar amongst the wiseasses of the world (now *that* sounds like a cool domain name! : ). Robert was very causal and very smiley, very different from the seriousness he portrays on film. Nick was very polished and gave such a compelling demo of the managed C++ Quake II port that I couldn't help but jump in and beg for more. I, on the other hand, said the word "crack" and mentioned my colleague as he IM'd himself onto my computer screen, both times making Robert roll his eyes at me (off camera, I'm sure). I also went off into la la land once when I answered a question that Robert hadn't asked, causing Nick to jump in with an answer. All in all, having yourself filmed for posterity was pretty different from giving a talk. It was nice, because I had Nick and Robert to play off of and Robert was very good about moving things along. It was hard because, unlike a talk, there were things that I said that I wished I hadn't merely because they are permanent. Hopefully it went over well as a whole. I don't know if I'll be able to watch it myself. Someone please tell me how it is when it's published next month... Windows XP Remote Assistance Rocks!Wednesday, July 23, 2003 I just had a "Windows Moment." I was on the phone with my Dad who has Windows XP and was having trouble. Since he paid for my computer science degree, he assumes that I'll be his tech support. In fact, everyone in my family assumes I'll be their tech support; it's annoying as hell! I don't know how support folks diagnose and fix problems over the phone all day long. More than 5 minutes and I'm ready to say, "How much was that computer science degree, Dad? I'll write you a check." Anyway, after trying it for about 20 minutes (and failing), I asked him if he had the Remote Desktop settings on his My Computer->Remote tab, thinking that I could use terminal services to solve his problem. Of course, since he was running XP Home, he didn't, but he did have Remote Assistance. So we tried it. And even though he's in the back woods outside of Fargo, ND and on dial-up (isn't this a commercial for Windows XP?), he was able to email me a request for remote assistance (Start->Help->Ask for assistance->Invite a friend to connect to your computer with Remote Assistance) and I was able to connect to his computer (through my firewall!) and solve his problem (half of Office '97 was installed on C: and half on D: and wasn't happy about it at all). Wow. That's a feature that made my life better. Using GotDotNet Workspaces For Commercial WorkWednesday, July 23, 2003 When I visit Redmond, I share an office with Andy Oakley, the PM for GotDotNet Workspaces. Workspaces was recently released from beta to v1.0 and when that happened, Andy sent around feedback from users. Of course, folks love it in general (even some hard-to-please MS internals), but I was surprised to see to some folks were using private Workspaces for their team's main source code base. I shouldn't have been surprised; this makes a lot of sense. Private workspaces provide a protected space for file sharing, discussion, bug tracking and source code control. The last time I set up a commercial software development team, I needed weeks to get all of this picked out, installed and working and I needed an IT guy to keep it running and backed up. I remember hearing about a 3rd party that was going to bundle all of this together for a fee, but never got around to it. With Workspaces, MS already provides the whole team development environment, including VS.NET integration and a web interface, and it's free! Plus, with a private workspace, only folks on your team get access. IMO, the only big piece that was missing from Workspaces was a way to pull down all of the source onto a build machine for regular automatic builds. For commercial work, this is key. So, Andy, tired of my whining, built a command line tool for pulling down all source from a GDN Workspace (and put it up in it's own GDN Workspace). Personally, I'd be slightly happier if it took arguments from the command line instead of a .config file, but that's easily added from the Genghis CommandLineParser class for those that are interested. Enjoy! My $5 Digital Music ExperimentTuesday, July 22, 2003 I *really* want to own my digital songs, so I've been dying for a real site to purchase them one at a time, instead of buying entire albums I don't want or ripping the songs off of the albums I do own. Towards that end, I was excited about BuyMusic.com and immediately spend $4.95 on five Avril songs. Overall, it was not a happy experience. What I love about BuyMusic.com is the site:
Unfortunately, I hate BuyMusic.com because of the Digital Rights Management (DRM) experience:
The whole experience made me want to cry. The site was so great, but the playback was *so* hard. Why do I have to be treated like a child? I'm dying to pay for the music I want, but I don't want to be penalized for it. I really wanted to find the inevitable hacking tool to strip the DRM off of the music I downloaded so that I could use it more freely, but what's the point of that? This kind of hacking would break the license agreement and is no better than downloading mp3s (although the the latter is a hell of a lot more convenient). My First Visit to MS StudiosThursday, July 17, 2003 I went with Erica Wiechers (.NET Show heart throb) to visit MS Studios today. Ostensively we were there to preview the Applied XML Developer Conference videos, some of which Erica will be turned into MSDN TV episodes. However, as long as we were there, Bob Snyder gave us the nickel tour. The front entry was even more secure than the normal MS buildings, being encased in wire fencing and not yielding to my badge (we had to be let in from the inside). Once in, it was a big building with lots of open space and fun decorations. I got to see several blueprints of famous imaginary places, e.g. the spaceship from Lost in Space, the Addams Family house and the island from Gilligan's Island. I got to see the two green rooms where "talent" gets ready in the full locker rooms, then relaxes on the coach 'til it's their turn (although neither room is green). I got to see all of the studios, including standing on one of BillG's markers, seeing the set where he interviewed with Larry King and the other set where he recorded his antitrust testimony. I also got to see the set for the .NET Show, which looks like the inside of half of a giant bowl, so that they can blend in custom backgrounds, both physical and logical. I go to see all kinds of cool a/v routing and mixing equipment, putting my one little PC attached to my home theater system seem so pathetic in comparison. I even got to see some live footage of Steve Ballmer that they were filming that day (man, he gets excited when he speaks : ). In general, I've been getting to see and do a lot of cool stuff here at MS. Recommended. Alan Cooper's Has A DreamMonday, July 14, 2003 In addition to bending my head back during my flight lesson, Alan Cooper always manages to bend my brain back, too. Here's a guy that invented drag-n-drop UI development umpteen years ago and he's been in the business ever since, mostly doing interaction design, but lately trying to tackle the problem of software management. His main thesis is that "web designers are called programmers, programmers are called engineers, engineers are called architects and architects are never called." He justifies this statement by comparing architecture to real-world architecture, which is very different from what the IT industry has co-opted the term mean. For example, in the world of physical buildings, an architect meets with the clients to understand their needs and listens to their ideas. He then designs a building via a series of increasingly specific sessions with the clients to understand what they need and with engineers to understand what can be done. He uses these interactions to produce blueprints to hand off to the engineer. The engineer decides how to build the building, e.g. what materials to use, what to build or buy, what labor is needed, etc. Before we had mass-produced parts and giant spec books describing every material under the sun, this often required experimentation, which would also feed into the production of a more detailed set of plans to hand off to the construction workers, who do the actual building of the structure. While the structure is built, the engineer and the architect checks in to make sure that things are meeting their requirements and, in fact, it's the engineer's job to sign off when it does. Likewise, there are inspectors that check to make sure things are up to code at certain phases of the project. In the world of software, we've got inspectors, they're called QA staff. We've got construction workers, they're called programmers. We've got engineers, they're called software engineers, even though we have yet to decide what being a "software engineer" means (often it's just another fancy word for "programmer"). We sometimes have architects, but we tend to rely on the combination of engineering and usability folks, most often skipping the usability and most of the contact with the customer altogether. Alan's view of the world of software is that, because we don't have this very interactive role that really corresponds to the architect very often, non-technical management really has no idea what's going on in the software construction process. Instead, they have to rely on engineers and programmers to tell them things, when they feel like it, and those guys lie (or plain don't know). Likewise, because there is so little architecture, what comes out the other side is often not what the users want anyway. In Alan's world, architects fill the role between engineers and customers and non-technical management, designing software that users want and communicating what's going on with management. Likewise, engineers design software to spec that works under stress; programmers build software that doesn't crash; QA checks to make sure that this all happens the way it should. One of the benefits of Alan's view is that before engineering happens, architects figure out in a detailed and thorough way what needs building, handing complete specs to the engineers. Likewise, before programming happens, engineers run the experiments and make the technology and resource decisions before any code is written, passing off details specs to the programmers. These details specs also flow to the QA folks, which uses them along with their own quality standards to make sure that the software is right before it ships. If this seems silly, think about an inspector signing off on a house before the foundation is poured, a construction worker pouring the concrete before the plans are done or the engineer deciding on the materials of a building before he knows if it's a house or a mall. Software is certainly more fluid than concrete, but it's not so fluid as we like to believe, as evidenced by the number of failed software projects and the cost overruns associated with them. We think we're doing architect/engineer/programmer now, but Alan disagrees. What we have is software being hand-made by craftsman from the iron age, but reproduced like appliances from the industrial age. What we need is real engineering for the information age. Alan puts it nicely, "We're standing at the front edge of the information age with really sharp tools from the industrial age." Of course, what Alan's talking about is the standard waterfall method of software design, which is what I learned in software engineering school. So why don't we do it? Because we don't like drawing up blueprints. We like to make the lights go blinky, blinky on the monitor. Building a shed in your backyard is quicker and easier without an architect or an engineer involved, but is that how you want your house built? Another benefit of this model of architect/engineer/programmer is that it gives non-technical management much more visibility into and control of the process. You may not think so, but this is good. Right now, the only control they have over the process is the schedule. We say, "That'll take two years," and they say, "You've got four months." Why? Because they've been down the "two year" software process before and gotten burned ~100% of the time, whether the software ships late or it doesn't ship at all. At least if they say "four months," they've only lost 1/6th of the money when/if things go bad. If we want to take the giant hammer of schedule out of their hands, we've got to give them something else so that we have the time we know we need to build quality software that we can be proud of. I don't know if Alan's right or not, but I sure want him to be. As an architect, I want the tools and the opportunity to design something that the customer will want (I've been down the other road before and it never ends well). As an engineer and as a programmer, I want to build something that will be loved and used when I'm done. Isn't that what we all want? My First Flight LessonSunday, July 13, 2003 Normally a title like "My First Flight Lesson" would be a metaphor for something else because I'm generally much more engaged by mental pursuits than physical ones. However, in this case it's literal; Alan Cooper (the Father of VB) gave me a lesson in his plane (a Piper 6-seater). Tim Ewald and his wife were staying at my house after the Dev.Conf., so Tim and I and the Sells brothers went to the local little airport to pick Alan up when he flew for an Saturday afternoon lark. When we got there, Alan invited us up for a sight-seeing trip. I volunteered to sit in the back with the brothers, giving Tim the front seat, but Alan insisted that I sit up front in the co-pilot's seat, clearly having something in mind. After we took off and Alan took us out of PDX airspace at around 2400 feet, he told me to take the yoke because he was turning off the autopilot. After that, he took me through part of a real lesson, including playing with the flaps via the pedals at my feet, banking, trimming, descending, leveling off after a descend and in general, crapping my pants. Flying a plane was not what I expected to do that day, let alone so close to the ground with non-trivial winds and thick cloud cover. Not one do we have plenty of bumps and *sideways* motion to make mere riding a harrowing experience, but I had my boys and Tim in the back with their lives in my hands in the front. I find the sensation beyond my feeble powers of description, but it was fabulous and terrifying and emproudening all at the same time. And at least I had control. All Tim in the back got was the terrifying part! Alan said that I did well and had a natural ability to keep the nose up (apparently that's a problem for newbies). Luckily, because he didn't want to make the folks in the back puke, he didn't turn off the engine like he said that he would normally do. Apparently there's nothing like cutting the engine to give a new pilot experience with what actually happens (apparently the plane doesn't drop like a brick no matter how many I were to drop in my shorts). Also, he said that normally he'd make me take off and land, but only in a Cessna, which has special landing gear for newbies, whereas had I done poorly on the Piper, I could've caused $200K worth of damage. On the other hand, while I was relieved not to experience the wonder of zero-engine flight or my first landing, I'm disappointed not to have those experiences as well. It was pretty damn cool to have full control in all three dimensions. That is, except when we overflew the helicopter that the tower didn't warn us about and that we didn't see 'til we were over it. Both Tim and I dropped some bricks when that happened... The Killer App for Web ServicesFriday, July 11, 2003 After watching Amazon's amazing presentation at the Dev.Conf., it hit me that Amazon.com is the killer app for web services. Not only are they technically cool, but they have two business models for themselves and their associates built right in:
Amazon has turned the infrastructure on which they build their own business into a major revenue generator for not only themselves, but for associates. And, if they wanted to take it further, Amazon could provide all of their payment, distribution and storing/querying data as web services for things that weren't even available for sale on Amazon.com, e.g. medical supplies or porn, removing the need to build all of these services yourself. In fact, they're already planning on doing this for payment services. *That's* what web services are supposed to enable. *Wow*. Applied XML DevCon Trip ReportFriday, July 11, 2003 Dave Winer's Keynote:
Don Box:
Brian Jepson:
Don "XML":
Patrick Logan:
Ted Neward:
David Ing:
KeithBa:
Speaker Panel:
Ken Levy:
Jeff Barr
Steve Loughran:
Tarlochan Cheema:
Tim Ewald:
Chris Dix:
Aaron Skonnard:
[WebService]
My First Press Contact @ MSMonday, July 7, 2003 Today I spoke with Todd Bishop, a reporter from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer ("the Seattle PI"). He was interested in my spout entries about my initial experiences with Microsoft, specifically the BillG ThinkWeek stuff. He called last week, but I didn't call him back right away. Instead, I asked my grandboss (my boss was out on vacation) what I should do. I remember during NEO that MS has very clear instructions about when to talk to the press, i.e. never. Of course, some folks at MS talk with the press, but unless it's specifically part of your job, you're supposed to refer the press to other folks more trained in the ways of the wily reporter trying to get the dirt on MS. So, when Todd called and I hadn't yet made my millions on MS stock options (any day now... : ), I thought I'd ask around first before making any career limiting moves. That was early last week. It wasn't 'til today that I got the approval to give the interview. In fact, I'm pretty the MS marketing guy checking on what Todd was up to had a longer conversation than I did. Here's pretty much the entire conversation (paraphrased from imperfect human memory):
Aha! He's just lulling me into a false sense of security for next time! : ) [ed: Apparently Robert Scoble took the brunt...] The Danger of Good Debate SkillsMonday, June 23, 2003 I have been in technical arguments many times where I knew I was right and used every once of my debate skills to convince the other person of their terrible wrongness. This can go four ways:
Being right is fun, of course, as is finding someone that's willing to change your mind (lots of folks don't like to argue). Wearing a person down is no fun at all, but by far the worst is that I'm wrong and I stay wrong. Unfortunately, as a professional communicator for the better part of a decade, #4 is a real possibility and it's something to really watch out for. Being right is easy. Recognizing that I'm wrong is easy when I'm arguing with someone with good communications skills. Recognizing that I'm wrong when the person I'm arguing with isn't quite up to the task, that's hard to detect and fix. Of course, even harder is being wrong and having no one to tell you you're wrong, but I can't blame that on anyone but myself. : ) Learning to LearnSun, June 22, 2003 The most important thing that I've every learned is how to learn. I and a few other lucky souls gained this knowledge at the tutelage of one of my mentors, Don Box, during my tenure at DevelopMentor. Not only did I have an amazing thinker to learn from, but I had a enormously difficult topic to learn on: COM. When I started learning COM in the early '90s, only a few souls inside of MS really knew it. The only real book in the world on COM at the time was inscrutable and no one with the necessary communication skills and the time to teach COM had yet grokked it fully. Don had written a five-day short course entitled Essential OLE, but only given it a few times, so hadn't really gotten over the hump (as evidenced by the title of the course). It was my job to become the second instructor on COM at DM. I've always been one of those people that, when faced with a topic and the proper motivation, could almost always learn it easily. This skill helped me to get good grades, but didn't teach me how to really learn; it was too natural for me to understand how I did it. Unfortunately, COM was too hard to learn "naturally" and there's nothing like preparing to stand up in front of a group of people to motivate you to learn. In fact, the first time I'd had to teach COM, I was so nervous on the last day (when I was to teach the material I knew the least well), that five minutes before my first lecture of the day, I had to find an empty room to hyperventilate. I literally didn't know what I was going to say. Unfortunately, I didn't have the option of bailing at the last day of this class unless I was prepared to give up my job at DM. It wasn't the bailing that was the issue; if somebody else that knew the material was available, I could've bailed (that's how cool DM was). Unfortunately, only Don knew it and he was out of town. So, I had only one choice -- fake it. I wasn't proud, but public speaking is like any other form of entertainment and "the show must go on." As I was giving the slides that morning on COM structured storage (a particularly nasty topic in COM), I found myself learning how it it worked as I told the story to my audience. All the studying and experimentation I'd done had given me the foundation, but not the insights. The insights I gained as I explained the technology. It was like fireworks. I went from through those topics in a state of bliss as all of what was really going on underneath exploded in my head. That moment taught me the value of teaching as a way of learning that I've used since. Now, I always explain stuff as a way to gain insight into whatever I'm struggling with, whether it's through speaking or writing. For me, and for lots of others, story telling is where real insight comes from. Still, teaching without the foundation of knowledge isn't effective. How do I gain that foundation of knowledge? I consume the available material and ask "why" a lot. If I look at a class hierarchy and it's design isn't immediately obvious to me, I ask why it was built that way and why was that way chosen over another. And to the answers to those questions, I keep asking why 'til I get to something I know already or until I get to a human reason. The reason for not stopping 'til I get to something I know is that I believe that all learning is only as affective as well as it can be tied to what you already know. How easily it is to learn something is directly related to how much you already know about related topics, so the more you know, the easier it is to learn more. However, when humans are involved, aesthetics take over, e.g. the reason that C++ has member initialization lists and Java doesn't is that Stroustrup liked that feature and Gosling didn't. The process and benefit of asking why is described well in a novel I'm reading: "It put me in contact with military planners from a dozen nations, and more and more they began to come to me with questions well beyond those of military strategy. ... I didn't think my answers were particularly wise, I simply said whatever seemed obvious to me, or when nothing was clear, I asked questions until clarity emerged." What made this process so amazing with Don was that we were both doing the same thing: experimenting and telling each other how it worked, which made for a very tight feedback loop. The loop got better as we added more people, like Tim and Keith, both of whom are also amazing thinkers. Audiences are good because of the feedback that they can provide, but optimized feedback like this got us all leapfrogged very quickly into deep COM thinkers. The goal of all learning is clarity. My own method involves taking in the available material, asking a bunch of "why" questions and then telling somebody else 'til clarity emerges. After COM, I've successfully applied that method to learning how all kinds of other technologies work, how to run a business, how to write, how to manage, how to lose weight (50 pounds and holding) and, most recently, how Microsoft works. Thanks, COM (and Don and Tim and Keith and every audience I've every had : ). Naming My FeedFri, June 20, 2003 When I built the Windows Developer News feed on my home page, it was an attempt to build a Windows equivalent of SlashDot. Unfortunately, I'm not interested in keeping up on all the news in the Windows developer space and the few folks that have stepped up to post on this site are largely spammers (although not all of them). Also, in my own feed subscriptions, I find that the ones I'm most fond of are from individuals, not groups. Plus, my grandboss recently put a fine point on it, "I hate the name of your feed. That's not what it is." As always, when I'm faced with something like this, I turn to the community, specifically my own readers, who seem to have an unhealthy desire to participate in things like this. When I asked them for their input, I was overwhelmed with more the number of responses; and good ones, too (it probably helped that I was giving away a free seat at the Applied XML Developer's Conference [July 10th -- register now!] to the one I picked)! Here're some of the best that I didn't pick:
The one I did pick was a blend from three guys: Mike Prilliman, Chris Burrows and Roland Tanglao. They each gave me parts of my new RSS feed name: "Marquee de Sells: Chris's insight outlet". This name has tons of wonderful qualities:
Of course, once I'd picked a name that blends entries from three people, I had the problem of how to award the prize: a single seat at the the Applied XML Developer's Conference. And then I remembered that it's my conference, so all three of them get free seats. Welcome! BTW, the Applied XML Developer's Conference is going to rock. Register now before all the seats are gone. End-To-End RSS + CommentsWed, June 18, 2003 My RSS 2.0 feed exposes end-to-end support for the comments specifications I'm aware of:
Several other folks are working on producing and/or consuming the <wfw:commentRss> extension as well, including Joe, Sam, Scott, JamesS and Kevin. JamesD posted instructions on how to do it with MoveableType. Hopefully Dare, Luke and Nick will follow suit. Releasing Nested Objects in RotorMon, June 16, 2003 Chris Tavares is making more progress finishing up the Ref-Counting in Rotor project: class FinalizerObj { Running this app under our ref-counted Rotor yields the following output: C:\Home\Chris\Projects\Rotor\src\tests>clix FinalizerTest.exe Created Finalizer object 0 Created Finalizer object 1 Creating containing object 0 Finalizing finalizer containing obj 0 Finalizing finalizer object 0 Finalizing finalizer object 1 Created Finalizer object 100 Created Finalizer object 101 Creating containing object 1 Finalizing finalizer containing obj 1 Finalizing finalizer object 100 Finalizing finalizer object 101 Created Finalizer object 200 Created Finalizer object 201 Creating containing object 2 Finalizing finalizer containing obj 2 Finalizing finalizer object 200 Finalizing finalizer object 201 Created Finalizer object 300 Created Finalizer object 301 Creating containing object 3 Finalizing finalizer containing obj 3 Finalizing finalizer object 300 Finalizing finalizer object 301 Created Finalizer object 400 Created Finalizer object 401 Creating containing object 4 Finalizing finalizer containing obj 4 Finalizing finalizer object 400 Finalizing finalizer object 401 In other words, all top-level and 2nd-level objects are finalized deterministically. Wahoo! Exposing RSS CommentsThu, June 12, 2003 So far, comments have gotten a lot of play in the RSS space:
However, what's missing is the ability to pull out a list of comments associated with an item. Instead, folks like Sam publish their comments as a separate feed, and then feed readers thread the comments with the content by comparing the elements from the type feeds (as well as all of the other feeds). That works for most standard-sized RSS sites, but what about sites that exposes hundreds of thousands of entries like msdn.com? Cached per site comment feeds don't scale as well as on-demand per-item comment feeds. Towards that end, I'd like to propose another element to the well-formed web's CommentAPI namespace: commentRss. The commentRss element would be a per-item URL for an RSS feed of comments. It looks very like the wfw:comment element: <wfw:commentRss xmlns:wfw="http://wellformedweb.org/CommentAPI/"> http://bitworking.org/news/commentsRss/52 </wfw:commentRss> With wfw:commentRss, the RSS reader can pull the comments down on demand, merging them in with the cross-references from other blogs as it does now. In addition, an extension to RSS like this would allow feed readers to subscribe to comments for a particular item, either manually for conversations in which the user is interested or automatically when the user posted a comment for an item. Ref-Counting + Rotor StatusThu, June 5, 2003 I just got this email from Chris Tavares (who's doing the lion's share of the implementation work to add ref-counting to Rotor):
Even though they're being called by us and by the GC, this is the first time we've been able to get finalizers working. Wahoo! My First API ReviewWed, June 4, 2003 Maybe you're getting tired of my posting my "firsts" at MS, but that's the beauty of this medium. I get to say what I feel like and you get to listen or not, as you choose. Mostly this "Dear Diary" format helps me to digest the world around me. Many times, the writing itself has helped me to clear my head. If you haven't tried it yourself, I recommend it. So, on with my next "first." Today I crashed an API review. I happen to be on a few internal Longhorn mailing lists and recently got an announcement of a new API that was going up for its first review. I didn't know what to expect, but I hoped at least to see some familiar faces and to introduce myself around. Now, the way I work things, I try to really pack myself into meetings when I'm up in Redmond so that I can get the most out of my time away from home (I'm still based in Portland, OR). In this case, I had a meeting scheduled from 9am to 10am in building 5 and then had to truck across campus to building 42 for the API review at 10am. Needless to say, I was late (the only thing harder than finding parking in the sea of cars after 9am is finding your anonymous rental car when you come back for it). Luckily, MS meetings seem to start late as a matter of course, so I hadn't missed anything. However, I was a bit surprised that in more than a month of introducing myself around, there was a room full of 10+ people and no familiar faces. They glanced up at me when I came in the door and seemed a bit confused as to who I was, but didn't ask or toss me out on my butt (it's handy being 6'5" sometimes : ). The process was pretty cool. Apparently the team building the API had answered a standard questionnaire from the review team, which included target users, potential security problems and representative sample code that users would be expected to construct. The review team had prepared by going over the questionnaire and prepared topics of discussion (the latter making this review process better than most I'd attended). The API team provided answers to the questions and took notes on how to fix their API. I was impressed with the whole thing. The API team was very open to suggestions for improvement, even letting me put in my two cents (I couldn't help myself : ). And the design team gave out just the kind of advice I want all .NET APIs to follow, e.g. use best practice coding conventions in sample code, support IDisposable at a macro level instead of a micro level, expose collections from properties returning IEnumerable (not from the parent object itself), prefer properties over Get/Set methods (as appropriate), don't tack the name of the enumeration type onto the enumeration values themselves, prefer overloads to parameters that can be null, prefer typed parameters to object parameters, etc. In addition, where the API team had reinvented the wheel (they were experts in their problem domain, not the entire .NET Framework Class Library, after all), the review team pointed them at what to emulate and where to look for more guidance. The whole process gave me quite a bit of confidence in .NET maintaining the high degree of consistency that's it's achieved to date (the FCL consistency is not perfect, I admit, but it's a damn sight better than COM APIs ever were and don't even get me started on Win32). After all that, I did finally get to introduce myself (the note taker on the API team wanted to know who was complaining : ), I helped name a Longhorn data structure and I met a General PM that I needed to talk to anyway, so it was a useful experience all around. Submitting to Billg's ThinkWeekTue, June 3, 2003 As has been mentioned out in the world, every once in a while Billg takes time to back away from whatever he's working on to think big thoughts. Employees are allowed to influence those thoughts by sending in papers about whatever they want. I heard about this a few days before the deadline and, as I had an idea for something, I wrote up a quick treatment. In spite of the odds against me, I couldn't let such an opportunity pass by w/o even trying! I sent my short piece around internally and, because of it's length (I only had time to put together 2.5 pages), I expected to get all kinds of feedback of the lack of depth. Surprisingly, I only got one of those and a bunch of positive feedback, including some useful tweaks. After applying the tweaks and running into the limit of time I could spend on it (I did have any actual job to do, after all : ), I sent my paper to the screener that makes sure that Bill's not bothered by trivial things, expecting to hear where to file it. But I didn't hear that. In fact, I didn't hear anything at all 'til today when my own patron St. VP thanked me for my submission, being all kinds of vague about whether Bill will be handed my paper or not, but pointing me to some folks internally about making my idea happen. I took this as letting me down gently, but further emails indicated that my paper *had* been sent along to Bill. Now I'm wondering what the heck Bill will do with it. Ignore it? Shred it? Send me an email with a single line, "Make it so, #1?" I'm not sure which one is scarier. After having survive my first encounter with a VP, I wonder if I'll survive my first encounter with it's commander and chief. Keep your fingers crossed. : ) My First Meeting with a Senior VPSat, May 24, 2003 On the anniversary of my first month at MS, I took my first meeting with a Sr. Vice President. I'm told that's a big deal. One colleague who'd been at MS for a few years said, "Wow. You must be important. I expect that the first time I'll be in a meeting with a Sr. VP will be at my firing." In my case, it's not that I'm important (I'm not) that got me involved with such a meeting; it's that I have recently been asked to participate in a project that needed to meet with the VP to clarify some review feedback . Or, in other words, it was a pretty pedestrian "here's what we've come up with since the last time we met" kind of meeting. What made it interesting was that it was with a Eric. Imagine a company run as a strict meritocracy that's one of the most important and profitable in it's industry. Now imagine that this company has been around for a while and has acquired tens of thousands of employees in a multi-layered hierarchy, with only the best and the brightest surviving and the best of the best rising to the top. That's MS. Billg is layer 1. Eric is at layer 4 w/ a small number of peers. I'm at layer 9 or, as I like to call it, "the bottom." By all rights, that means that Eric should be "5" smarter than me, and I can see him fitting comfortably into that category. Had Eric wanted to shred us, I'm sure he could have. Luckily, it was a nice, calm, productive meeting w/ him cutting quickly to the main points (in spite of the fact that he was reading and making notes on our handouts while still listening to our presentation). He also make some pretty interesting comments, especially considering how little time I'm guessing he's had to think about the problem space. At least one comment put me on a path that I like much better than the one I was on (although we'll see how he feels about it at the next review). The comment that startled me most, however, was when he said that he read my site. If this is my last post from inside the big house, you'll know how much he liked it. : ) My First Month @ MSWed, May 21, 2003 Today marks the 1-month anniversary of my assimilation. For those expecting references to my "scars," you can be as surprised as I am that there aren't any. In fact, my coming to MS has not really been a big deal. Oh, folks were nice and I got emails from all manner of internal and external folks with nothing but good wishes, but, somehow, I expected something different. Frankly, given the world's impression of MS, I think I expected hazing. In fact, I woke up this morning with memories of dreams involving all kinds of bizarre knowledge- and activity-based initiation rites lead by my grand-boss that reminded me of a cross between my college fraternity and Fear Factor (although maybe I was still reliving my MSDN "morale event" experience : ). Why did I expect all kinds of horrible things? Because MS is a very intimidating company; they play to win, seemingly at all costs. This A+ personality trait is certainly reflected inside the company, but there's something else there, too. The part that surprised me was that job #1 seems to be exactly what I would pick: do "the right thing" for the customer. In fact, doing the right thing is so important that MS builds a "customer advocate" position right into the heart of their culture; these people are called "Program Managers" (PMs). PMs are not to be confused with "Product Managers," who are marketing folks. Of course, MS has all the standard positions, e.g. marketing, managers, developers, testers, documentation, etc, but they also have this PM position that, as far as I can see, forms the glue for the company and affects everything else. The PM's job is wake up in the morning and think to him/herself, "What's the right thing to do today?" The range of things that fall into this category is far too wide to even give you the bounds, but essentially it's whatever someone else isn't already doing (or isn't doing to their satisfaction : ). Once they identify the right thing to do, they can attempt to take "ownership" of making it happen (your boss gets a say in how you spend your time). Once ownership is acquired, that's when things get interesting. PMs have all kinds of responsibility, but no authority. While this kind of position is generally one to avoid in the world of corporate politics, the internal product cycle training video I watched a couple of weeks ago points out that "responsibly without authority" is by design. Instead of ruling by fiat, PMs have to wander around the company finding folks that are involved with what they're doing to get their "buy in" and their help. The way to do that is through old-fashion politics, i.e. gathering consensus, persuasion, trading favors, brow-beating, table thumping, complaining up your own management chain, complaining up your opponent's management chain, etc. It's not just a popularity contest, although being liked certainly helps. It's also about your reputation, as established by your technical chops and your ability to produce, among other things. Under-achievers need not apply. In other cultures where the hierarchy is all, such meritocracy can't really work (in spite of lip service to the contrary). There's often too much of an attitude of "who the hell are you to tell me what to do?" to even be allowed to present your case. Luckily, since there's a whole bunch of folks wandering the halls looking for favors, the MS culture makes it OK to work in this manner. That's why the role of PM forms to key to the culture, imo. Oh sure, MS is a real company with a well-established hierarchical chain of command (there're currently 7 people between me and Billg), but hierarchy is only one part of the organization, and arguably not the dominant one (although I'm still new : ). In a way, the whole system is kind of like the legal system. In the court room, lawyers from each side argue before a jury, each using every trick in the book to push their agenda and the law is only part of the equation. The jury decides who's right. At MS, multiple PMs all wrangle with each other, each using every trick in the book to push their agenda and technology is only part of the equation. Sometimes, it's the folks inside of MS that serve as the jury. Sometimes, it's the market itself that serves as the jury. In the latter case, that's why you sometimes see multiple products from MS that seemingly serve the same purpose, e.g. C++ vs. C#. Those are two groups that both think that they've got the best way to accomplish their goals and they've both made strong enough cases internally to be allowed to compete externally. Probably the reason that each product exists in the first place is because one day some PM probably woke up and said, "MS really needs a C++ compiler" or ".NET really needs a C-like language that's not as hard to use as C++," and look what they got themselves into. : ) Of course, it's not just PMs that have the responsibility to constantly be on the lookout for the right thing. Everyone is supposed to get up every day with this attitude. It's just that PMs only get to persuade; they don't get to order things to be done (unless they get staff). Since MS is filled with folks all aiming to do the right thing, everyone is constantly committing to help with new ideas. That's why you see MS folks at conferences always busy and always rushing back to their rooms to check their email; they've committed to do way more than a normal human can do because as the "right things" come along, it's darn hard to say "no." That's why I started this spout entry on a Wednesday but I'm finishing it at 8am on a Saturday while the rest of my family sleeps. Even in the last month, I've accumulated a bunch of projects of varying sizes, all of them "right" as far as I was concerned. According to the training video, in spite of this overwork and the recent lack of any expectation of riches, folks that come to MS don't seem to ever want to leave. It's that darn culture of the PM again. I've worked at large companies that run by fiat and they suck. Hell, I've worked at small companies that work by fiat and they suck, too. Is it any wonder that, assuming you have merit, once you find a stable, interesting, friendly company judging you on your merit that you're loathe to leave? I find myself cataloging the skills that I think I'll need to be successful at MS and it seems like I've been preparing for this job since I was 12 years old. I've hopped from company to company looking for the perfect fit. DM provided that fit during the boom. Is MS going to provide it from now on? My First Talk As A Microsoft EmployeeFri, May 16, 2003 On Wednesday, I gave my first talk as a Microsoft employee. I was told that the talk was for a bunch of UK folks that needed to be put on the .NET path and could I do 90 minutes on intro to WinForms in a conference room on campus? I can do intro to WinForms material for hours without preparation, so I didn't do any. Instead, I showed up with my laptop and plugged it into the overhead, where I then spent 10 minutes wrestling to get it out of suspend mode (the world needs faster hard drives!). While my HD woke up (apparently jet-lagged from the trip between building 5 and building 43), I started warming up the crowd with questions "How many of you are C++ programmers? How many VB programmers?" The room was split pretty evenly between C++ and VB, taking half of my jokes away (I'm happy to make fun of either C++ or VB programmers equally, but it's less fun when only half the room laughs). Plus, these guys were *way* jet lagged, so getting them to even keep their eyes open in the afternoon after they'd arrived was a challenge, let alone getting them to laugh or even engage. And then, because my HD was still shaking off the dust, I asked "Did you hear anything good today?" Predictable, they said that they'd like the story of web services (Don had been there earlier in the morning) and that caused me to launch into my rendition of how WinForms + Web Services provided a wonderful way to keep all of the UI logic on a single machine, as opposed to web applications, where the UI is split between the client and the server. They weren't biting. Plus, after diving into some WinForms intro material and having it fall flat (anchoring and docking normally wows 'em), I did a bit of deeper digging into my audience. It turns out that most of them were old hands at WinForms, throwing my planned material right out the window. Luckily, I did find a topic that they're weren't familiar with: href-exes. So, I did my normal href-exe shtick for about 60 minutes, getting them to wake up, ask questions and even laugh a bit at my witty repartee. Thinking I was in the clear, I opened the floor for questions. Of course, the first question they asked was the same question I'd have asked if I were in their shoes (as I so often was until about a month ago), "What's new in WinForms 2.0?" And that's where things got shaky again. I had some ideas of where WinForms 2.0 was going in the next release of .NET, but nothing concrete (I've been buried in Longhorn and a whole new culture too deep to dig into WinForms futures yet). Plus, even the things that I did know, I had no idea what I could say. Where these guys under NDA? What could I say to them if they were? What can I say to them if they're not? Even if I'm not supposed to say anything, I want them to like me (every speaker's guiding principle) and I wanted to say something besides "I know, but I'm not going to tell you. <bpffffft>!" So, I stammered out what I knew to be some WinForms desires without making any promises on their behalf and hoping no one would ever know (except my closest friends reading this spout entry : ). It wasn't a happy experience. I should have talked with the WinForms guys before my talk so I knew what I could say about the future. Rookie mistake #1. Rookie mistake #2: In an effort to stay open to these guys, I wrote my alias on the flipchart and then, while I filled in the domain, kept answering questions. When I looked back at the flipchart, I discovered that I'd written "[email protected]". Doh! Since it was a flipchart and not a whiteboard, I couldn't even erase it. <sigh> All in all, I think I got them jazzed about href-exes, but it was definitely not my finest talk. Luckily, it was internal and to a small group; I would have been mortified to have given that performance at a larger venue. Plus, making fun of VB programmers isn't fun anymore. I mean, they're customers, too. Looks like I'm going to need some new material... My First Week @ MSFri, 4/25, 2003 After my first week at Microsoft *everyone* wanted to know how it went, both internally and externally. I learned some things:
"Look with favor upon a bold beginning"Mon, Apr 21, 2003 A couple of weeks ago, I was having lunch with my wife at a little Chinese restaurant. My fortune was the title of this spout piece. I immediately associated it with my recent job interview at Microsoft and it made me smile. I had already pretty much decided to take the job, but it was nice that the Universe agreed with me. : ) Right now I'm sitting in NEO (New Employee Orientation) for Microsoft employees. Not only is it a cool name, but the nice folks at Microsoft provide a wireless network for new folks that can't spent hours w/o one (although I'm the only one that's geeky enough to have his laptop out at the moment : ). I start today as a Content Strategist on the MSDN content team at Microsoft, Corp. I'll be in charge of the Longhorn DevCenter. A DevCenter is a section of the MSDN web site that focuses on a specific technology area, like the XML/Web Services DevCenter. Longhorn is Microsoft's next major operation system (and different than Windows Server 2003, which is the OS that Microsoft is launching this month). I can't (yet) say anything more about Longhorn except that it's cool enough that I took a job at MS so that I could get my hands on it. If you are dying for more info on Longhorn, but aren't quite ready to change your employment arrangements to get it, check out the PDC in October. And, if you stop by and say "hi," I'll show you the implant scars... : ) [comments] XML For HumansThu, Apr 17, 2003 When I sat down to write this piece, I didn't get why the work that Don, Gudge, KeithBa, Yasser, Tim and ChrisAn is doing is so amazing. I mean, I know that they're smart and I know that they're building the hell out of their stuff, but why? It seems like everyone that gets into blogging starts by writing their own blogging engine. It's like C programmers writing editors, C++ programmers writing string classes and XML programmers writing XSD<->Class codegen. Sure, it's a useful learning tool, but earth-shattering? Worth that much energy from that many guys? When they're done, what great problems will be solved? Don't get me wrong. I love the that the web makes it easy for anyone to not only publish but also get an audience. I also love that there's a protocol (RSS) that lets me subscribe to my favorite freelance authors in any one of dozens of tools (I'm into SharpReader today). I even like the Dear Diary style of writing because it leads itself to thoughts, feelings and insights that give me greater understanding of not only the topic but the author. As an added bonus, blog entries have turned into everything that's good about mailing lists w/o the endless angle brackets that remove the need to write in coherent sentences. Blogs feel like the kind of democracy we had that lead to the American Revolution when the world was re-shaped with big ideas, written by great authors. But does the world need yet another blog engine? Personally, while it's primitive, I find that FrontPage have served me well as a blogging tool. The mental overhead is small, the development is nil and I get red squiggles. It falls down sometimes, but I've spent far less time maintaining the infrastructure for my content than I would if I were to build my own blogging engine. On the other hand, while I don't feel the need for another blogging engine in the world, I definitely see value in what those guys are doing. Specifically, they're building apps, which is not something that XML guys are traditionally into. In fact, I'm scratching my head trying to think of another kind of XML-based technology that isn't infrastructure-based and I'm not coming up with one (even InfoPath is a dev-tool). Is RSS really the first mainstream use of XML that hasn't nothing to do with technology for it's own sake? Are blogs the killer app for XML? I know web services were supposed to fill that role, but while they do solve a real problem, they're not for consumers. My aunt in FLA couldn't make use of a web service. However, she could definitely subscribe to an RSS feed and read up on the local news, her job and her hobbies. Of course, the beauty of having infrastructure guys building apps is that they get to put into practice what they preach. When stuff is a pain (like every single XML API ever invented and most XML vocabularies), they feel the pain. The difference between us and them is that instead of just wrapping a layer of abstraction around the ugly stuff like we have to, they can actually fix it. I started this piece wanting to shake those guys until they could tell me why they cared so much. How ironic that thinking through the issues in the very medium they're digging into helped me figure out what they were up to. The blog engine work is but the vehicle. They're riding the app train to enlightenment. They're trying to understand how XML can be used to solve problems for real humans. How can I argue with that? PricelessMon, Apr 14, 2003
I don't know how my son picked up on the tiny bit of fame I've acquired amongst a small, strange (but loveable!) group of people, but he did and now he thinks I'm cool. I'm sure it won't last, but I plan to enjoy it while it does. : ) Oregon & Open SourceFri, Apr 4, 2003 I had an interesting experience yesterday when I was asked by Mike Sax to come to the Oregon capitol building to testify against HB 2892, known as the Open Source Software for Oregon Act. In general, the bill talks about the benefits of open source, open standards and open data formats, most of which I didn't have any issues with. However, I got up at 6a and drove an hour down to Salem because of the following clause: "(2) For all new software acquisitions, the person or governing body charged with administering each administrative division of state government, including every department, division, agency, board or commission, without regard to the designation given the entity, shall: By requiring state government employees to write a special justifications, this bill erects artificial barriers to adopting commercial software, above and beyond the fact that commercial software requires an initial payment (which should be more than enough of an edge for open source software). If you've never been to a government bill committee hearing, I highly recommend the experience. I was in a little hearing room with a bunch of other folks, all interested in this particular bill. I signed my name on the list of folks "against" the bill so that I would have a chance to testify. The chairman called first proponents of the bill and then opponents up to the microphone three at a time. Some of the the proponents were teachers and school staff that had put Linux and other open source software to good use in combination with old computers used as thin clients against a back-end server (using X-Windows, I assume). They claimed that they solved themselves all kinds of trouble because open source software was "immune to viruses and security problems" (now *that's* effective propaganda! : ). Some of the proponents were embittered IT staff and new college grads looking to bring some old-fashioned democracy back into a country that had been recently taken over by corporations. It was all I could do to avoid pointing out to them that that the country had been taken over by corporations shortly after Adam Smith wrote "The Wealth of Nations" in 1776 and the budding US government adopted the ideas therein to fund their new country. The basic story of the proponents was that open source was good, so it should be mandated over closed source. The opponents, on the other hand, were largely suit-wearing fellows from large groups of commercial software corporations (one of which didn't hesitate to remind the esteemed committee that it's member companies had paid $135M in Oregon state taxes last year). Their arguments were that undoubtedly open source software was clearly already being used by government bodies, that there was no rule against it and that their should likewise be no rules against proprietary software. Only Mike, owner of a small Oregon-based software company, and me, owner of nothing at all of interest, represented the "little guy" on the opponent side (we stuck out because of the lack of either a neck tie or a suit coat). 19 copies of my written testimony were submitted without comment at the request of the chairman who assured the audience that all testimony would be read. My verbal testimony was limited to pointing out that shackling proprietary software was "bad engineering" because it could easily cost the state of Oregon more money in the long run; maintaining source code is a lot more difficult than maintaining commercial software for normal humans. I also pointed out that being open source did not prohibit viruses or security problems; the first computer virus ever was written on a Unix, the predecessor to Linux and that they share an identical security model. To be fair, Unix wasn't open source, but I stretched the truth less than the open source guys, so I didn't feel too bad (Unix was "source available" at the very least : ) And finally, I let the committee know that open source didn't mean open standards or open data formats and that, in fact, those were things that commercial software companies had done the most to bring into greater use over the years. Having never done anything like that before, I wasn't sure how well I'd done, but one of my fellow panelist (a procurement officer from another giant suit-wearing organization) wrote "nice job" on his pad of paper while his colleague preached the wisdom of "amending the language" of the bill to be more "practical." At the end of the hearing, the chairman of the committee called out some names of the most credible, suit-wearing fellows from each side of the debate to form a working group to come up with a bill that the committee could actually consider submitting for a vote. The sub-text was that the bill as it currently stood was pretty silly; it didn't allow any greater freedom to pick open source software but it did limit the ability to choose proprietary software, which wouldn't make those Oregon software company tax payers happy. This seemed a most sensible conclusion to me and gave me confidence that our government isn't so screwed up after all. When the room was cleared, I was assaulted by one of the open source proponents, reminding me that Unix wasn't open source and that Linux would never have any such problems (which makes the presence of virus protection software for Linux seem like a very poor business decision). I was also cross-examined by a tall, thin, balding, old-ish man with the longest grey beard I've ever seen in person. He seemed very knowledgeable and was very interested in the details of my opinions. He reminded me of nothing more than a fallen Richard Stallman in 30 years and added to the surreality of the morning. On the way back to our cars, Mike thanked me for coming and asked if I was glad that I'd come. It surprised me to learn that I was. Not only did I feel that my "just a guy" presence helped the suits make their case, but I felt like I was doing my duty as a citizen. Who knows, this experience might bring out the politician in me. I'm sure I could do at least as well as Jessie Ventura. : ) Microsoft & PatentsTue, Feb 18, 2003 The buzz was all around VSLive last week about Microsoft patenting the .NET Framework API. In fact, an eWEEK reporter asked my opinion and this is what I said: I'm no patent attorney, but in examining the patent application, it looks to me as if they're claiming a patent for the entire .NET Framework, which comprises the classes that a .NET programmers uses to get anything done. My understanding of the patent laws says that Microsoft has every right to do this, since they invented it. The reason for them to do this is so that they can maintain control of its implementation. Hopefully Microsoft will grant a royalty free license to all implementations of the CLI ECMA standard, which makes up a large percentage of the .NET Framework, or that standard will be worthless. Even if they grant such a license, projects like Mono are still vulnerable. They plan on implementing even the parts of .NET that aren't standardized, like ASP.NET and WinForms. This would allow Windows programs compiled against .NET to run under Mono on Linux, providing a single API for cross-platform applications. This has been tried and failed in the past as recently as Java, but I had hoped that the Mono guys could make this work. When Microsoft is granted this patent, they can shut down the non-standardized parts of Mono whenever they want. That's good for Microsoft share holders, but it's not good for 3rd party developers that want to write cross-platform solutions. What I should have added is that as far as I know, Microsoft hasn't ever enforced its patents. Apparently they keep them for defensive reasons only. Or, they could be waiting 'til they have a critical mass of patents, enforce them all at once and win the game of Risk that they're playing with the world. : ) Saving Your CareerFri, Feb 7, 2003 In response to Never Send An Email In Anger, Lars Bergstrom recommended that I set up a rule that defers sending an email for 1 minute. I set it for 2 minutes under Outlook XP like so:
And it works like a charm. It's always w/in the first second that I wish I could recall a message, so two minutes should be more than enough. Wahoo! Let The Language Wars ContinueFeb 3, 2003 A friend of mine pointed out to me the other day that the C in CLR stood for "Common," that is, the CLR provides the same services to all languages. In fact, at this date, C# and VB.NET are really just "skins" over the CLR and provide nearly identical functionality. With that in mind, why are we still fighting the language wars? There are several reasons:
I've found that the "Common" means that teams can use the same language at more levels of their system, i.e. no more VB for this, C++ for that, script for this other thing. Now it can be all VB or all C# (or almost all, 'til Yukon ships) and the number of different kinds of programmers needed for a single project goes down. That provides a real benefit to companies trying to keep costs down and quality up while still allowing the team to decide what language features are important to them. This is goodness. With the increased shared capability at the runtime level, I'm actually hoping that language motivation will increase. I think that there's still a lot left to do to make the programmers more productive and the motivation for one language to gain ground over another is a good thing. Plus, I still have an excuse to make fun of semi-colon-challenged programmers and what could be better than that? : ) OOD (The D Stands for "Dead In The Water")Fri, Jan 24, 2003 Reading a very interesting book which I'll discuss in a future post, I came to a startling conclusion. As much as I love OO thinking and programming, OO databases are never going to fly. I realize that this may not be so startling considering how long OOD products have existed and how unsuccessful they've been so far, but the conclusion I came to was *why* they'll never fly. The reason is simple: the data itself is more valuable than the programs that use it. For an OO guy, taught that behavior was everything and data was an implementation technique, that's a startling conclusion. However, the beauty of a database is that it's devoid of behavior, or, if there is behavior, it's layered in on top of the data. Programming languages come and go along with the ideas that underlie them and the applications that are built with them. Relational data, on the other hand, is a model that's simple enough, but complete enough, to move forward from application to application, accumulating value as you go in the data itself. And, since the relational model is so entrenched, no technology for the last 10 years or the next 1000 would be complete without support for it. Even Microsoft, IBM, GM and AT&T will prove to be less enduring than relational data, the tools to program against it and the tools to slice and dice it w/o programming anything (the latter are amazing strong already and continue to grow). Data in OO databases, on the other hand, are bound to behavior and worthless for anything but the limited set of applications for whom the behavior was paramount and the data an implementation detail. When things change, as they always do, how are you going to get the data out so you can do things different? You're going to dump it to the simplest, most complete, most firmly entrenched data format that the world has every known -- relational data. OO persistence formats are, by their natural, tied to a specific object model and therefore hopelessly proprietary. And with the emergence of XML, OO persistence formats are going the way of the dodo, even for applications running on machines without a database server. Why would I persist data to a closed format when I can choose relational data for the big stuff and XML for the small stuff? Both provide endless tools for slicing and dicing and bringing forward when the application dies. With OO persistence, when the app goes, so goes the data. The problem with OOD is that things are *too* seamlessly integrated. Ironic, no? Sealed SucksThu, Jan 23, 2003 I've come to the conclusion that the use of the "sealed" keyword in C# (and the concept in .NET) should almost never be used, at least on a class. Semantically, sealed applied to a class means that a class cannot be used as a base class. For example, the ImageList class from the System.Windows.Forms namespace is sealed: public sealed class System.Windows.Forms.ImageList : ... { ... }What sealed means is that the designers of the ImageList class didn't take the time to test what would happen in all the scenarios where an ImageList is specified but a subclass is provided, e.g. MyImageListEx2. So, since they didn't test these scenarios, they're protecting developers from deriving from the ImageList base class when bad things might happen. They're also protecting developers if the base class changes radically in the future and derived classes no longer work. Stop it! I don't want to be protected in this way! Instead, I want to try to derive from ImageList and see if it works in the scenarios in which I'm interested. And if future versions of the ImageList base class break my derived class, I want to update my derived class in ways that work across versions of the base class or have two versions or whatever else I need to do to make it work. By making a class sealed, I just don't have any choice in the matter, which severely limits me in what I can do. As an example, I think that the current ImageList implementation sucks in the following ways:
So, I'd like to build my own ImageList implementation that has the exact same programmatic interface, but that pulls images from manifest resources, fixing most of the issues above. All of the controls that take images get them from an ImageList type, so I need to provide my extra functionality in a type that's compatible with ImageList. However, the only way to do that in .NET is via inheritance and the damn sealed attribute disables my ability to do that! Instead, I have to build a custom component that's also an extender provider if I want to provide the same design-time usage as an ImageList and I have to tell developers using my image list component not to use any of the ImageList-related properties because it will conflict with mine. I literally can't package my functionality in a way that's developer-friendly in the same way as the ImageList and it's all because it's *sealed*! Of course, the ImageList class isn't the only one. I had a solution to the problem of asynchronous method calls to web services from WinForms apps the other day (the problem is that an extra hop is always required to get back to the UI thread), but my solution can't work because the base delegate type required to make an asynch call is sealed. And the list goes on and on of things that I can't do because somebody is "protected" me from potential bad things. Please, please, please, please, please don't mark your classes sealed. If you do, folks that want to provide extended functionality, and test to make sure that it works the way it's supposed to, don't even have the option. Type compatibility is a huge deal when you're dealing with class-based abstractions instead of interface-based abstractions and using the sealed keyword throws all of that away. The C++ community survived very nicely without sealed for a decade and it's made half of the classes on my site possible. You took away my deterministic finalization. Must you also take away my ability to derive? Feedback on this Spout itemNew Year's ResolutionWed, Jan 8, 2003 I just flew in from 2002:
and boy are my arms tired! Even I look at that list and think "holy workaholic, Batman!" Of course, I couldn't have done all these things alone. I worked with fabulous co-authors and co-contributors. Thanks to you all and I look forward to working with you again in 2003! In the new year, I have the following goals:
We'll see how I do this time next year, especially on those last two. Feedback on this Spout itemApps Are People, TooThu, Jan 2, 2003 I concerned Wahoo! patron sent in the following screen shot of the current high scores as exposed by the high scores service:
As you can see, the high scores service has turned into the poster child for the need for web service security. However, after hanging out at two Web Services DevCons and talking with Keith "Mr. Security" Brown, I've come to the conclusion that there is no good way to secure this specific web service. Even worse than that, there's an entire class of web services just like it that can't be guaranteed secure. The goal of the high scores web service is to provide access only to the Wahoo! app itself. Only Wahoo! knows when someone has earned their score while playing instead of merely faked it through some other means. Of course, this application is just for fun, so the lack of a secure high scores repository is hardly a big deal (although I'm often surprised when people tell me that they play wahoo.exe instead of sol.exe). However, imagine that a real application wanted to do the same thing. Maybe Microsoft only wants Office applications and not Linux knock-offs to query the clip art web service on microsoft.com. Or maybe your business wants to provide a web service that only your apps can talk to. Of course, Microsoft doesn't ship the source code for Word and your business is unlikely to ship the source code for your apps if you plan on making money on them (remember actually making money on software?), so that's different than Wahoo!, isn't it? No. Every time you put code on a machine outside of your sphere of influence, you might as well ship code, especially if it's .NET code, which comes with a built-in disassembler! "But wait," you say. "What about code obfuscators?" Well, that arms race has already been fought in the world of Java and disassemblers won. There was no way that an obfuscator can hide the details of Java byte code without completely destroying the usability of the code (particularly in the area of performance). .NET will be no different. "Aha! But what about unmanaged code? x86 can't be read like IL." You're right. It is harder to disassemble x86 than IL, but not significantly so. The x86 disassembler tool vendors have been working for a lot longer on this problem and we've bred guys like Andrew Shulman and Matt Peitrek that dream in x86 and only translate to English as a convenience for their wives. The bottom line that if you ship code, you might as well ship the source, as it's available anyway. If a computer can execute your code, somebody can read it and pull out the details of whatever you're using to obfuscate the communication between your code and your back end (whether it's a web service or not). "So why do I have to log in all the time if there's no such thing as security?" Well, it's not as if there aren't ways to secure systems in the world, but all working security thus far invented depends on physical security, whether it's the private part of a key pair secured in your safe or a password secured in your brain. The reason that applications can't make use of this kind of security is because they don't have access to safes and their minds can be read much more easily that those of humans (although a rubber hose is just as effective as ildasm.exe, when something is really important). So what does that mean for applications that want to make use of back-ends? I see four solutions. One, you can tie security to a user instead of an application. For example, if I make everyone sign up for a Wahoo! account to log high scores, I'd at least know who to ban from use when they faked impossibly high scores. However, it also opens up the possibility of the user completely bypassing the application altogether, including any checks that the client may make on validity of the data being sent to the back-end. The second possibility is to make things hard*er* on the potential hackers. Keith summed it up nicely: "After looking at your JPG, I'd suggest some server side filtering. Limits on user name length and content would help you at least reduce the amount of space that hackers can use for advertising. OTOH, you've got a nice little bulletin board going there ;-)" Anything I do in the way of encryption and obfuscation between the app and the back-end will slow down potential hackers and for something like Wahoo!, I don't suspect it would take much to keep folks honest (turning off the asmx test page would be a good first step, for example : ). One way to make things harder, and a third way to secure apps, is a dongle, which adds new hardware to a machine along with the software. Unfortunately, a dongle could be reverse engineered just as a hunk of software. It's only the fairly uncommon use of dongles that keeps them from being broken more often. The fourth option, which Keith mentioned, is Microsoft's new Palladium platform, which operates with special hardware and software to limit a user's access to their own computer, kind of like a universal dongle. The real question is, what's secure enough? Unfortunately, this is an arms race that will eventually be won by any hacker with enough smarts, time and money. For users, we continue to make things harder on hackers as we transition from passwords to biometrics and smart cards. For applications, we've got dongles and precious little else, which makes it darn hard to treat apps like the independent entities into which they're evolving. Feedback on this Spout itemSpout Archive |
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