General
There are 27 entries for the tag General
Windows Phone has now been out for just over a year and Mint.com has had four active threads on their support forums for almost the same amount of time (here, here, here, and here). Out of the four requests, only two have an actual status and they contradict each other, with one saying it is “not planned” and the other saying it is “under consideration”. In addition, the last response from any Mint.com employee was over 4 months ago. These requests, assuming no duplicate votes, have gained a total...
Thanks to the UserVoice team for enabling custom statuses on Windows Phone Marketplace Requests! I have added a few additional statuses (I’m still working out exactly what makes the most sense), but the biggest change is to the Declined status. Previously, when a request was marked as Declined, all voting was closed. I was using this status for several different reasons: To show that the request was off-topic, either because it belonged on the Windows Phone Suggestion Box or because it was a feature/enhancement...
Just 3 days ago, I launched the Windows Phone Marketplace Requests site. Since that time, the response has been staggering, to say the least. At the time the screenshot above was captured, there are 600 active ideas and 3,228 active users. In an effort to help keep the site organized and usable, I have added some general guidelines for submitting requests. Remember, there is just one person maintaining this site so I’m asking you to help me keep the request quality high. I also just upgraded the...
As most of you know, I do a lot of presentations each year, mostly at local code camps. As a speaker, it is always great to see new people in my talks and answer questions since in almost every talk, someone asks a question I haven’t heard before. One of the things that most speakers, including myself, like getting is feedback. We want to know what you thought of the presentation, both the material and the delivery. It used to be that most code camps passed out evaluation forms to provide this feedback....
Microsoft has reached a critical milestone in the Windows 7 development cycle with the limited release of the Windows 7 Release Candidate (RC) today for Microsoft TechNet and MSDN subscribers and general availability from the Microsoft Download Center on May 5th. There has been a lot of excitement about Windows 7 and, so far, the excitement has been justified. The Windows 7 RC comes after extensive beta testing and feedback from the MVP community with a lot of enhancements and bug fixes since the...
It seems Microsoft has always had a love/hate relationship with consumers when it comes to support issues. When things are going well the general public loves Microsoft, but when things start going badly public opinion heads the same direction. For whatever reason, the Microsoft Help and Support website seems to be one of the last places a lot of people turn to for an actual resolution. One of the problems has always been that the solutions presented require more than simple knowledge about how to...
Phil has an excellent post that builds on Jeff Atwood’s explanation which very clearly describes the differences between the various release types: Beta CTP Daily Builds/Interim Releases Fully Supported Out-of-Band Releases RTM/RTW Releases Service Pack Releases Summarizing what both Phil and Jeff said: Alpha: The software is complete enough for internal testing. This is typically done by people other than the software engineers who wrote it, but still within the same organization or community that...
Even with the newest releases of StyleCop, FxCop, and Visual Studio 2008, there is still a lot of room for improvement in the suite of technologies and products that make up what should probably be termed “Microsoft Source Analysis”. I know that calling StyleCop that name caused a lot of confusion since it was being compared to the built-in source analysis features of Visual Studio (at least the Team Edition SKUs of Visual Studio). I think the real heart of the problem is that Visual Studio comes...
One of my fellow GWB bloggers recently posed the question "Do you care about your developer community?" and offered some interesting ideas for user groups to adopt to help foster more community spirit. Hopefully whatever troubles D'Arcy is having will straighten themselves out, but the questions he asks and one of the responses got me thinking. I have always tried to be active in my local developer community and in the larger online community. I was active online far longer than I have been active...
More announcements from Mix came from Scott Guthrie, who announced the release of Silverlight 2 Beta 1. (In case you don't know, Silverlight 2 was previously called Silverlight 1.1) This release provides a lot of new features and controls, including layout containers such as a Grid and StackPanel, control skinning and templating. There are improvements in both networking and general performance as well. Better integration with Visual Studio 2008 is also provided as well as a new release of Expression...
At TechEd 2007, Krzysztof talked about building reusable libraries. The session abstract is below. You can download the presentation as an XPS file. The presentation was also recorded, and the WMV file can be downloaded from here. This session covers the main aspects of reusable library design: API design, architecture, and general framework engineering processes. Well-designed APIs are critical to the success of reusable libraries, but there are other aspects of framework development that are equally...
As you might have noticed, my last post included Technorati tags. This blog has been listed with Technorati for quite a while now, but I've never actually tagged any of the posts. Even when Subtext added tag cloud support, I didn't bother with it. I'm not sure why I am now (perhaps the fact that the actual post categories aren't being displayed correctly has something to do with it), but I'm starting to add tags to my posts. I can't guarantee that every post will get them until tagging becomes second...
At TechEd Developers Europe, Krzysztof Cwalina presented a talk called "Framework Engineering: Architecting, Designing, and Developing Reusable Libraries". If you weren't able to make the conference or missed his talk, you can download the video recording (in WMV format) or just the slides (in XPS format). The abstract for the session reads: This session covers the main aspects of reusable library design: API design, architecture, and general framework engineering processes. Well-designed APIs are...
I just came across a post by Tim Sneath announcing the WPF Virtual Bootcamp. This is a three-day virtual training course that covers all aspects of WPF as part of MIX University. The best part about this bootcamp is that it's completely free. This was originally delivered on the Redmond campus earlier this year to a small invited audience and features: A keynote from Ian Ellison-Taylor, the general manager responsible for WPF, Silverlight and client platform tools. Introductory sessions on core WPF...
If you are a Microsoft Certified Professional (MCP), you should be sure to check out Georgeo's blog. He is the Microsoft Certified Professional (MCP) Community Marketing Manager (as of June) and before that he managed the MSDN Webcasts Program. Yesterday he announced some new benefits for MCPs worldwide as part of the MCP 2008 program. These benefits are part of MCP 2008 Phase 1. As long as you have your MCP ID, you can log in to the the MCP site and start using the new benefits right now. As part...
It seems there is a lot of confusion on how to properly catch exceptions in .NET, especially among newer developers. There are a lot of good references available on MSDN and on the web, but a lot of these are either very advanced or just hard to follow. I'm not going to discuss the CLR exception classes and go into the internals of how the .NET runtime generates exceptions. I don't want to discount this information, as it is helpful to know, but it isn't essential to understanding how to properly...
Phil recently blogged about a newly discovered security vulnerability in the Subtext blogging engine due to a flaw in the way the FCKEditor control was integrated. As far as we know, no one was seriously affected and both a fix and a workaround were found very quickly by the core development team. If you are running Subtext 1.9.x, a patched version of the Subtext.Providers.BlogEntry... is available as a zip file. After you download the patch (Subtext1.9.5-PATCH.zip 7.72KB) , unzip...
I don't know about you, but I get lots of email spam, most of which I just completely ignore. I do, however, periodically review what lands in my "Junk e-mail" folder to make sure something wasn't put there by mistake. As a result, the first email in the list always ends up getting displayed. I'm not trying to make a political statement in any way at all, and whatever your views on the current U.S. military actions in Iraq aside, this latest form of email spam is just downright revolting. This spam...
Exception handling seems to be a common problem for .NET developers, particularly younger developers. We pretty much all know that you should wrap operations that have the potential for failing in a try/catch block if you are interested in being able to do something about the error that occurred. I'm not going to talk about the rules and guidelines for using exception handling. Instead I'm going to focus on a particular aspect of exception handling, which I tend to call exception bubbling. Exception...
A word of advice: Don't ever leave your cell phone in a theme park. That's what happened to me on Thursday night, and in less than 5 minutes (the time it took for me to walk away, realize I didn't have it, and go back) it was gone. If this were a normal cell phone, I wouldn't be quite so annoyed about it. Unfortunately, it was an i-mate JasJar. Since there are not very many of these in the U.S. (at least not where I live), I would be very surprised if someone turned it in to customer service at the...
It was just pointed out to me that I missed publishing the calendar for the Management and Operations Track. It is now available at: webcals://calendars.office.... The complete list is: All sessions, by Track: TechEd 2007 - Architecture Track TechEd 2007 - Business Applications Track TechEd 2007 - Business Intelligence Track TechEd 2007 - Database Development and Administration Track TechEd 2007 - Developer...
The great folks at EventPoint (the company that coordinates Tech·Ed for Microsoft and is responsible for the Schedule Builder) have updated the RSS feed I was using to generate the Internet Calendars to include the rest of the sessions as well as some additional data that made my life much easier. (Thanks, Andy!) I have updated the calendars, so if you downloaded these as a subscription it should have been automatically updated. If not, you can download them from the following links. I have also...
[edit: 16 May 2007] The calendars have been updated and a few new ones added. Check this post for more details. [/edit] Even though the Tech·Ed 2007 Schedule Builder is live, it is just as cumbersome (in my opinion) to use as ever. I had hoped that with the advent of AJAX, Silverlight, and the other interactive web technologies the schedule builder would have been more...interactive. The idea of having to pick a time period from a drop down list that contains more than 20 items and constantly having...
For those of you who have been following my blog, you should remember that I used to work at a local computer security company, Sunbelt Software. Just over a year ago, Joe joined Sunbelt a their Chief Scientist for Security Research. (Disregard the date on the press release, the year is incorrect and should be 2006.) If you are wondering why Joe was important to Sunbelt, he was one of the developers behind the VIPRE scan engine that is employed in the V2 release of CounterSpy. Joe did bring a great...
Yesterday, the Technology Review published an interview with Bjarne Stroustrup. It is an interesting interview, but I think it leaves out some important aspects of the real problems. I think the real problem is that "we" (that is, we software developers) are in a permanent state of emergency, grasping at straws to get our work done. We perform many minor miracles through trial and error, excessive use of brute force, and lots and lots of testing, but--so often--it's not enough. While this is certainly...
In the past week, I've received three very unusual unsolicited job offers from Monster. Now, I realize that a lot of companies advertise on Monster and even more of them troll the resumes that are there looking for candidates. Mostly, these are head-hunter types that send job offers in bulk. These offers, however, caught my attention because they have absolutely nothing to do my skills or work experience. I've snipped the incriminating portions to protect the guilty. The first one came from one of...
I just saw in the latest issue of eWeek that Microsoft has hired veteran virus researcher Vincent Gullotto to head the Security Research and Response Team (SRRT). Gullotto is a crack anti-virus researcher who has worked with McAfee and Symantec. He will become the general manager for the SRRT team, which handle all aspects of malware research and response. It will be interesting to see how the other anti-malware players in the market respond to the news and even more interesting to see what Gullotto...