Monthly Archives: November 2003

Software that Doesn’t Stink

Eric Lippert and Neil Deakin are discussing sucky software. Both make the point that one gets more tolerant of suckage in software when one has spent enough time actually trying to do software “I failed to appreciate either of those facts until I’d actually done a lot of it myself. Once I appreciated these things, …

November 25, 2003 – 7:00 am | By admin | Posted in Life at Microsoft, mastery | Comments (0)

Dare, Deem, and Suge

Strangeness abounds. We are accused of smearing binary XML andpushingbinary XML in the same week, in both cases withinsinuation ofnefarious motive. Dare Obasanjo has the report. Mike Deem has been keeping up his blog again, and it’s really good. I’ve hesitated mentioning it, since last time I got hooked on his blog he stopped for …

November 21, 2003 – 11:39 am | By admin | Posted in Life at Microsoft, smart people | Comments (0)

Is InfoPath the Next Excel?

Larry O’Brien at SD Times asks “Is InfoPath the Next Excel“? He raises a number of interesting points, some of which I’ll try to respond to. First, he says: “It would be easier to say “yes†if InfoPath were programmable from .NET languages. Not so. For some reason, InfoPath’s programming model uses Microsoft Script Editor, …

November 18, 2003 – 10:15 am | By admin | Posted in Life at Microsoft, mastery | Comments (0)

Simon Guest Sold Out?

Simon Guest’s book on J2EE and .NET interop is available now.Amazon claims to have only five copies left in stock, so you might have to hurry up, or else try Barnes & Noble.

November 18, 2003 – 8:24 am | By admin | Posted in Life at Microsoft, smart people | Comments (0)

WordML Schemas Offered

The Danish ISB has uploaded the schemas for Microsoft Word offered under a liberal license. Various people within MSFT, Danish government, and others worked very hard to make this happen, and it’s a very significant announcement. The biggest news happened when Word began to support XML natively, though,and most people already had the right to …

November 17, 2003 – 7:47 am | By admin | Posted in Life at Microsoft, mastery, possibilities, software politics | Comments (0)

JFK to SEA

Zawodny remarks on the low fares for SJC to JFK. Tip for people going SEA to JFK, check out Jet Blue. Flights are all pretty much redeye, and serve no meals, buta number of our people who commute regularly between the two cities use Jet Blue and have no complaints. And the prices are really …

November 14, 2003 – 3:04 am | By admin | Posted in Life at Microsoft | Comments (0)

Application Coach

Just getting back from PASS summit where I was trying to help out the teams competing in the application development shootout. A bunch of us from the SQL team have been doing shifts as “Application Coaches”, where we are supposed to be experts in the various technologies the teams need to build the application. I …

November 13, 2003 – 3:08 pm | By admin | Posted in Life at Microsoft | Comments (0)

Sometimes a Dream is Just a Dream

About two months ago, I had a very vivid dream of losing a molar. In the dream, the tooth fell out and broke into multiple pieces. Losing a tooth in a dream is often a symbol of changes and growing in your life, and I thought of the dream in that context. When you are …

November 13, 2003 – 10:18 am | By admin | Posted in mastery, restaurant reviews | Comments (2)

Ted Leung @ OSAF

Dunno how I missed this one; yesterday was Ted Leung’s first day working at OSAF. All I can say is that this is very lucky for OSAF, and now they stand a better chance of actually doing things right. I had similar feelings when they hired Rys McCusker, working on a similar area of the …

November 11, 2003 – 3:29 pm | By admin | Posted in smart people | Comments (0)

Storyboarding UI

Today I am mocking up some UI storyboard. This is one of the fun parts of being a PM, and something I don’t get to do much since my group is concerned mostly with API design. The last time I did any intensive storyboarding was when we were designing XQuery Builder, which we showed at …

November 10, 2003 – 8:20 am | By admin | Posted in Life at Microsoft, mastery | Comments (0)