This Week on Channel 9: Feb 15 with Special guest Scott Hanselman
Feb 15, 2008
We had lots of laughs in the studio with Scott this week! Here’s the show recap: We have a new logo (courtesy of Lincoln Anderson at 352 Media) and Scott Hanselman joins us in-studio (0 - 1:45) Microsoft Entertainment and Devices acquires Danger Inc for consumer mobile phones (1:35 - 3:38) Microsoft Virtual Earth acquires Caligari for 3D rendering (3:38 - 5:32) Dan interviews Bill Gates and Bill leaves Facebook (5:32 - 8:17) Microsofties saying “so” and “actually” (8:17 - 9:04) Charles Torre’s Lang.…more
The Bill Gates Interview
Feb 12, 2008
I’m such a huge Bill Gates fan, not only for his technical and business brilliance, but for all of the work his foundation has done. That’s why when Jeff Sandquist and Charles Torre told me I was going to be interviewing Bill, I was….beside myself. The interview went well (in that I didn’t pee my pants or kneel to kiss his ring like some bad Italian mafia flick) and it was fascinating hearing how Bill still prototypes code/APIs and how he’s looking to do even more coding on health and education applications for the foundation.…more
Moving to the Channel9 Team!
Jan 17, 2008
This week I officially became the newest member to Jeff Sandquist’s Channel9 team! Here’s my quick-and-dirty interview on Channel9. I’m really excited to be on the team and yes, I am not afraid to go back to Stage 1 - Incompetence in the new employee stages.
The Stages for New Employees at Microsoft
Oct 26, 2007
Phil Haack blogged about how, as a new Microsoft employee, he’s drinking through the firehose [FYI to Phil: Brian Goldfarb has been using this as the motto on his blog since 2003, before Dare’s post] and I’d thought I’d add my two cents to the lifecycle of new employees. Microsoft absolutely has a “sink-or-swim” mentality for new hires (college or professional hires). That doesn’t mean there isn’t a vast support network or mentoring options, but it does mean that, in general you are given a goal or metric and you can decide how to reach that goal/metric.…more
Cribs for Geeks: Who's Geek-Crib would you want to see?
Oct 11, 2007
Jeff Sandquist is looking for potential Microsoft employees who wouldn’t mind showing how they’ve pimped their house with technology like X10, Windows Media Center, Windows Home Server, and more. This is an awesome idea and it rocks that Jeff and team are doing this. Amusingly, I dug up an old email from June, 2004 with Jeff and I talking about doing this, but he wouldn’t be able to until July because he was slammed.…more
How to fix Flash video on Windows Vista / Internet Explorer 7.0
Sep 17, 2007
I’ve had this problem occur on two PCs so I thought I would post the fix (courtesy of Brian Keller) since I’m likely not the only person running into this. Go to this page to install Flash (uncheck Google Toolbar, no idea what that has to do with Flash) You’ll get a confirmation screen that will say it’s successfully installed, but you still won’t be able to watch videos on MSN, YouTube, etc…more
Making an educated seafood choice
Jul 17, 2007
Courtesy of Jana, next time you’re out to dinner with friends, remember to pull out your handy Seafood guide provided by Seafood Watch so that you can make an educated choice on seafood entrees and avoid over-farmed or bad-for-the-environment choices. Without it, you’d never know that folks on the west coast should avoid Atlantic Cod, imported Swordfish (domestic is fine) or Yellowfin tuna. If nothing else, whipping out the guide and letting your dinner party aware of your intellectual seafood superiority.…more
Visual Studio Express and TestDriven.NET
Jun 01, 2007
Updated with follow up post on technical information in response to the comments. While I’m not a lawyer, my team owns Visual Studio Express and I wanted to respond to the concerns expressed by some over our recent communications with Jamie Cansdale of TestDriven.NET. TestDriven.NET is a 3rd party add-in to Visual Studio that provides testing functionality in Visual Studio. To be clear, we have no issue with the product (or Jamie for that matter), or its sale for use in professional versions of Visual Studio.…more
Microsoft Bloggers, the Movie
Feb 26, 2007
Update: Added Mike Swanson as Matthew Perry based on Brian Keller’s suggestion Update #2: Added Wes Hutchins as Peyton Manning now that I got a picture of Wes Update #3: Added Chris Flores as Ralph Macchio based on John Hipsher’s suggestion Update #4: Added area of focus for each Microsoft person Update #5: Added Raymond Chen as Masi Oka based on Sriram Krishnan’s suggestion and Ian Knox as Paul Bettany based on Lindsay Berg and Elise Peterson’s suggestion I saw this hilarious comparison by Josh Hallet on casting “Blog” the Movie and in the spirit of playfulness, I brought in two consultants, Ed and Brian, to chime in on who would star in a “Microsoft Movie.…more
Developer DJs - Is the Participation Era going to hit the dance floor next?
Feb 26, 2007
No, this isn’t about coding for live, but rather a relatively new movement called Live coding where DJs both mix and code during a live performance. As regular blog readers know, I’m a fan of Developer DJ’s like DJ Bolivia who has some great mixes for when you’re coding. There’s even a concurrent programming language, ChucK, for real-time audio synthesis. **Live Media Stream Editing **I’d love to see this taken to the next level where a DJ could easily edit/manipulate a live video stream of interesting images and video, say using XAML in real-time and have the UI actually change and react to the current tempo/bass of the music.…more