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As I have posted several times, we are building some interesting technology on my team (all, well most, to be revealed at PDC).
While we still have a few (but going very, very fast) SDE positions open, we are starting to look for some program managers as well.
What is the program manager? There is a more detailed description up [...] Read More...
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A good first step would be an IDE/Editor that can manage all of the code in a database and allow the programmer to dynamically construct queries to build views and otherwise manipulate the code. The environment could then generate flat files in order to be compatible with current compilers.
http://www.atalasoft.com/cs/blogs/rickm/archive/2008/06/06/why-are-our-programs-still-represented-by-flat-files.aspx
He could be on to something… [...] Read More...
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If you work for Microsoft in Redmond and would like to learn more about the projects I just posted about, we are having a “information session” from 13:00-14:30 tomorrow.
Don and Chris will be demo’ing some of the magic that we have been working on for the past couple years.
Email me to get the S+. [...] Read More...
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Several months ago, I posted about my team looking for language and compiler experts.
It is not very often that you get to be part of a team that is developing a programming language that aspires to be used by every developer on the Microsoft platform.
In addition, it is not very often that you can be [...] Read More...
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Forgive me blogosphere, for I have sinned – it’s been five months since my last post! ;-) You may have wondered why my blog has been “dark” for so long, and the short answer is that I moved to a new role at Microsoft in September 2007 and at about the same time had to deal with a series of illnesses in the family, which occupied a great deal of my time and attention. Winding back to September then … After 4 years of working on Web Service Standards and Interoperability at Microsoft (involving 21 WS-* specifications, 8 Feedback Workshops, 13 Interop Workshops and 4 Plug-fests), I’ve changed roles. I’ve moved back to my software roots, and taken a technical role as a Feature PM in the Windows Live Identity Services (aka Live ID / Passport) product development team. Live ID [1], [2] is an interesting place to learn about world leading software-as-a-service - the team runs one of the biggest authentication services on the web today - handling over 400 million active users and over 1 billion transactions per day! Interestingly, much of the current and future work of the Live ID team is focusing on leveraging web services technology and appropriate standards such as WS-Trust / WS-Federation to achieve broad interoperability and deployment for Live ID technology in the industry. Web services and standards-based interoperability are playing a key role in creating a network effect around identity data, which IMHO is one of the significant themes driving forward the "Third Age of Web Services" [3]. So in some ways then, I am really just moving from the sell-side to the buy-side of the standards business! [1] http://dev.live.com/liveid/ [2] http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb288408.aspx [3] http://www.thearchitect.co.uk/weblog/archives/2005/05/000357.html... Read More...
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Donald Ferguson, the original Chief Architect for IBM's WebSphere product line, has left Big Blue to become a Technical Fellow in the Office of the CTO at Microsoft. http://www.eweek.com/article2/0%2C1895%2C2084481%2C00.asp... Read More...
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Continuing this week's theme, yesterday Microsoft announced that Windows Vista has been released to manufacturing (RTM). It's "rock solid" and we're "ready to ship" said Windows chief Jim Allchin. Here's some video material, in case you haven't seen the most recent features and commentary: Video: Q&A With Jim Allchin | Video: First Look at Windows Vista | Video: See Windows Vista... Read More...
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MSR-TR-2006-133 - Challenges in Building a Portal for Sensors World-Wide Suman Nath; Jie Liu; Feng Zhao September 2006 http://research.microsoft.com/research/pubs/view.aspx?tr_id=1179 SensorMap is a portal web site for real-time real-world sensor data. SensorMap allows data owners to easily make their data available on the map. The platform also transparently provides mechanisms to archive and index data, to process queries, to aggregate and present results on a geo-centric web interface based on Windows Live Local. In this position paper, we describe the architecture of SensorMap, key challenges in building such a portal, and current status and experience.... Read More...
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http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2006/sep06/09-28ZunePricingAvailabilityPR.mspx Microsoft's new 30GB Zune digital-media player will sell for $249 when it hits U.S. store shelves on November 14. The device will come preloaded with songs, music videos, and film shorts from the companion Zune Pass subscription music service. There will also be the option of purchasing individual songs through a system called Microsoft Points. The Zune will come in black, brown and white. It will have wireless capability that lets people share music, playlists and photos from one Zune to another, and it will feature an FM tuner and a 3-inch LCD screen. The Zune will hold 7,500 songs, 25,000 pictures or 100 hours of video, and it will come with a set of earphones, as well as a sync cable and a device sleeve. More info: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/presskits/zune/default.mspx... Read More...
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MSR-TR-2006-85 - Planet Scale Software Updates By Christos Gkantsidis; Thomas Karagiannis; Pablo Rodriguez; Milan VojnoviÄ June 2006 http://research.microsoft.com/research/pubs/view.aspx?tr_id=1129 Fast and effective distribution of software updates (a.k.a. patches) to millions of Internet users has evolved into a critical task over the last years. The reasons are at least twofold: (i) the large, ever-increasing number of users requires costly server resources and (ii) the shrinking time between vulnerability disclosure and malware appearance requires rapid patching. In this paper, we characterize "Windows Update", one of the largest update services in the world, with the aim to draw general guidelines on how to best design and architect a fast and effective planet-scale patch dissemination system. To this end, we analyze an extensive number of data traces collected over the period of a year, consisting of billions of queries from over 300 million computers. Based on empirical observations and analytical results, we identify interesting properties of today's update traffic and user behavior. Building on this analysis, we consider alternative patch delivery strategies such as caching and peer-to-peer and evaluate their performance. We identify key factors that determine the effectiveness of these schemes in reducing the server workload and the network traffic, and in speeding-up the patch delivery. Most of our findings are invariant properties induced by either user behavior or architectural characteristics of today's Internet, such as heterogeneity, bandwidth asymmetry, or user population distribution, and thus apply to the general problem of Internet-wide dissemination of software updates. Keywords: Software Updates, Peer-to-peer, Caching... Read More...
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As a long time fan of the great utilities from the Sysinternals website, I think the news of this aquisition is good news all round: Microsoft Corp. today announced the acquisition of Winternals Software LP, a privately held company based in Austin, Texas, that provides Windows-based enterprises with systems recovery and data protection solutions in addition to offering a freeware tools Web site called Sysinternals. The addition of Winternals is a significant advance in Microsoftâs promise to lower customersâ total cost of ownership of the Microsoft Windows platform. Customers will be able to continue building on Sysinternalsâ advanced utilities, technical information and source code for utilities related to Windows. Press Release: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2006/jul06/07-18WinternalsPR.mspx FAQ about the acquisition: http://www.winternals.com/Faq.aspx... Read More...
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Today was the annual "Take Our Daughters And Sons To Work Day" at Microsoft, and one of the activities I got to try with my son Connor this afternoon was "Geoteaming", which is a team-building version of Geocaching. Geoteaming is basically high-tech orienteering - imagine a group of 9 adults and kids charging round the campus with GPS locaters, Pocket PCs (for the list of clues) and digital cameras (to prove you got to each way-point) trying to find "tokens" in secret cache locations, and you've got the picture! It was a multi-win event - great fun for everyone, meeting some different folks from Microsoft, a chance to demonstrate and practice some cooperation and team skills, plus some quality time with my son. I also understand what Jonathan Marsh is talking about now. The only down side is my son may think this is the sort of thing I get to do every day at work!... Read More...
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UW's ResearchChannel is now hosting the "Behind the Code" video series in high resolution at http://researchchannel.org/prog/displayseries.asp?collid=1122 Microsoft Research Guest Lectures and public talks by Microsoft Research employees can be viewed/searched from http://researchchannel.org/prog/displayinst.asp?collid=555 Today, the world-renowned scientists of Microsoft Research make up one of the largest, fastest-growing and most highly respected software research organizations in the world - one that will help define and redefine the computing experience for millions of people for decades to come. Enjoy a glimpse of the future!... Read More...
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Scoble talks about today's internal "employee town hall" meeting. These are not small little tweaks. They are wholesale changes to how Microsoft treats its employees. You will probably read about all the details of these changes (collectively known as the "My Microsoft" initiative) in the industry press over the next few days / weeks. How significant are the changes announced today? I think they will probably result in the biggest shift in the Microsoft culture in the last 30 years! These changes make the clear statement that delivering what you promise matters again rather than just being crudely stack ranked against the rest of the cogs in the machine. In other words, working with a great team will no longer be a curse, and can be the blessing it should always be. Undoubtedly there will be some growing pains with this transition, but in a few years I think we will look back on this point as a big turning point in Microsoft's history. I suspect we will be seeing many more greater things from LisaB in the future.... Read More...
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The online real estate site Zillow.com is now using Microsoft's Virtual Earth mapping technology and birds-eye view aerial photography to allow potential home buyers to more clearly see architectural design, landscaping, neighboring properties and other factors. Of course, I'm sure most of the initial traffic to Zillow.com will be homeowners wanting to see the current valuation of their real estate using the Zestimate models - and probably being pleasantly surprised if they bought even just 1 year ago! There is certainly a wealth of data about an address, bringing together property tax valuation, historic sales data, recent sales, market comparison information and per-square-foot cost data in one place that will increase the transparency in the real estate market. Of course, there will always be other market factors and interior property improvement factors to be considered, but at least Zillow.com is a great starting point and a reasonable framework for prompting further questions. I suspect real estate mash-up sites and property information agregators like Zillow.com will quickly become a benchmark for house pricing - at least in the Seattle area and probably much wider too.... Read More...
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