You've reached the internet home of Chris Sells, who has a long history as a contributing member of the Windows developer community. He enjoys long walks on the beach and various computer technologies.
Monday, Nov 3, 2003, 10:34 PM in The Spout
Time For An Exciting Career In Electronics
Here. The one where blogs and RSS have removed the inefficiency in the market in which I make my living. Luckily, few people make full use of such technologies, so I may be able to make the mortgage for a few more months...
Monday, Nov 3, 2003, 9:50 PM in .NET
All about Longhorn
Here. John Carroll says it nicely, I think: "Longhorn will be the first operating system where ALL functionality is designed to be accessed through managed code. WIN32's reign as the Windows API has ended, replaced by managed .NET APIs. ... WIN32 will still exist for backwards compatibility, of course, and native access APIs will exist for those applications which need it... However, Microsoft intends to ensure that all Longhorn functionality is accessible from a 100% managed program." He goes on to say other things that I think are interesting for the Longhorn developers of the future to know.
Monday, Nov 3, 2003, 9:34 PM in The Spout
In Search of Expertise
Here. The one where I finally figure out that membership in a profession does not imply expertise in that profession. For those of you saying "duh," that's not helpful... : )
Monday, Nov 3, 2003, 9:33 PM in .NET
My First PDC as a Microsoftie
Here. The one where I look behind the curtain, see the wizard and like it.
Monday, Nov 3, 2003, 10:45 AM in Tools
XmlSerializer Workshop
Here. Simon Steele has posted a most excellent tool for digging through an assembly of .NET types trying to build XML serializers for them. This helps you to figure out which classes are going to succeed at design-time instead of at run-time and shows you what's wrong. Much cooler than my silly command line app. Thanks, Simon!
Monday, Nov 3, 2003, 12:00 AM in The Spout
My First PDC as a Microsoftie
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:
- Longhorn, Avalon/XAML, Indigo, WinFS, ClickOnce: good
- Improvements in VS.NET and ASP.NET: good
- Indigo and ClickOnce on existing versions of Windows: good
- Avalon not available on
existing versions of Windows: not so good
(Avalon changes things all the way to the device driver level, so retrofitting it to existing versions of Windows is impractical) - Not being able to download the
PDC Longhorn and VS.NET Whidbey bits: not so good
(MSDN subscribers can request the CDs to be sent to them) - Developers
that didn't go to the PDC and don't have MSDN subscriptions not getting PDC
bits: not so good
(the public beta in the summer of 2004 will open this up considerably) -
The Longhorn Developer Center features and content: good
(whew : ) - Having all kinds of Microsofties at the PDC and on the newsgroups and mailing lists to answer questions and take feedback: good
- Publicly contributed annotations on the Longhorn SDK content: good
- Longhorn bits running under Virtual PC: good
- Longhorn bits amazingly functional and stable: good
- Longhorn bits not especially
speedy: not so good
(these are the earliest OS bits we've ever given to folks -- Longhorn will have years to improve in this and every other regard) - Availability of PDC network, both wired and
wireless: not so good
(don't know why this happened) -
Stacking up outside the rooms of overflowing sessions: not so good
(although MS attendees were very good about giving up their seats to paying customers) - Microsoft's commitment to pushing managed code so far into the OS: good
- Lots of folks interested in contributing to
the Longhorn developer community: good
(if you're planning something, please let me know)
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:
- Give a pre-conference tutorial on WinForms with Rocky Lhotka, a fellow giant Minnesotan with whom I'd never before had a chance to work
- Prepare Sunday night to do the keynote demo in Chris Anderson's place on Monday morning with Don Box and Jim Allchin in case Chris couldn't make it past the fires in time
- Hang out on the PDC keynote stage late at night, soaking up the Chairman of the Board and Sr. VPs doing their last minute preparations (and inadvertently making career-limiting statements : )
- Watch Don and Chris and Jim pull off an amazing all-code keynote that will go down in history as one of the PDC's best
- Hang out at the Ask The Experts session, coding up repros and solutions to WinForms questions alongside Mark "Mr. WinForms" Boulter
- Wandering the streets of downtown LA with Frank Redmond looking for Tim Ewald's surprise birthday party
- Answer questions instead of ask them at the MSDN booth
- Being interviewed by Jon Box of Sys-Con Radio and an old ATL student who blames me for his career choices
- Spent a lot of time telling people about MSDN Developer Centers, where my friends at MSDN work very hard to pull information out of the vast MSDN library and organize it for particular audiences, e.g. C#, VB.NET, ASP.NET, Security, VS.NET, the .NET Framework, Architecture, etc.
- Shake hands and sign autographs and have my picture taken with all kinds of old friends and ex-students and readers and conference attendees
- Gush like a fan-boy at Tim O'Reilly
- Watch a block full of cars all go backwards one night getting back into "first positions" (it was California, after all : )
- See the 4' high by 20' long WinFS schema and realize just how much work the WinFS guys are actually doing to capture "Everyday Information"
- Send out the official welcome to the WinFX newsgroups
- Make tweaks to several potential keynote demos at the last possible moment
- Do an interview with .NET Developer Journal that let me tell my side of all kinds of stories
- Get all kinds of feedback from internal and external folks saying nice things about the project that has consumed me for the last 6 months: the Longhorn Developer Center
- Go to a 1am show of The Metal Shop heavy metal "mock 'n' roll" band at the Viper Room on the strip in Hollywood with John Shewchuk and Matt Pietrek and screaming my voice raw to the lyrics
- Meet Sunny Day live and in person
- Hang out with Matt Pietrek, one of my personal heroes, along with Tim and Sarah and most of my closest friends (where was Craig?!?)
- Shake my tail feathers to yet another amazing Band on the Runtime gig
- Attend all kinds of technical sessions on the technologies of Longhorn so that I can continue to live the Longhorn life for those developers that aren't yet able to
- Start the collection of items for a Longhorn Developer FAQ which I'll post when it reaches critical mass
- Hang out with architects from two of the three main pillars of Longhorn (Don Box, Indigo and Chris Anderson, Avalon) at the The Kettle in Hermosa Beach
- Share a room with the 19-year old .NET wunderkind, Ryan Dawson
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.
Monday, Nov 3, 2003, 12:00 AM in The Spout
In Search of Expertise
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:
- How do you recognize expertise? I know it when it occurs in something that I'm familiar with, e.g. computer goo, but what about in a discipline where I'm not versed?
- How do you obtain expertise? I've got this down to a science for programming APIs, but can these techniques be applied to other disciplines?
Comments on my continued quest for expertise welcome.
Monday, Nov 3, 2003, 12:00 AM in The Spout
Time For An Exciting Career In Electronics
Monday, 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...
Friday, Oct 31, 2003, 9:36 PM in .NET
ChrisAn posts a brief history of XAML
Here. In general, anyone interested in XAML/Avalon/Longhorn should just subscribe to Chris's blog: http://www.simplegeek.com/blogxbrowsing.asmx/GetRss?
Friday, Oct 31, 2003, 4:52 PM
Who Are the Good Web Services Bloggers?
Here. Matt Powell, the Content Strategist for the Web Services Developer Center, is looking for your opinions on web services-related blogs. Please let him know your thoughts. In addition, he posts a signal/noise ratio rating for the blogs he's currently tracking. I *love* his description of Samy Ruby: "Sam is very popular but has left the world of Web services as we know it." : )
Friday, Oct 31, 2003, 4:28 PM in .NET
Hang Out in The Longhorn Newsgroups
Here. I'll be hanging out in the Longhorn newsgroups, as will MVPs and the product groups. Come on, come all!
Friday, Oct 31, 2003, 3:49 PM
Girls pummel man who exposed himself
Here. I find poetic justice enormously amusing...
Friday, Oct 31, 2003, 3:38 PM in .NET
Document-Centric Applications in WinForms, 2 of 3
Here. "Chris Sells expands on his first installment of this series by showing you how to integrate an SDI application into a shell while providing support for double-click document opening, a custom document icon, and adding documents to the Start->Document menu in the shell."
Friday, Oct 31, 2003, 3:36 PM in .NET
PDC Session Slides & Code
Here. Not all PDC sessions have slides and/or code yet, but most do. Enjoy!
Friday, Oct 31, 2003, 3:28 PM in .NET
Paul Thurrott's Windows SuperSite @ the PDC
Here. Paul's site has all kinds of Longhorn screenshots and videos from the PDC.