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, Aug 11, 2003, 12:00 AM in The Spout
I speak for the trees
After a few weeks at Microsoft, when I was feeling particularly frazzled with my work and travel schedule, Peter Drayton pulled me aside to reinforce what I'd heard before: the first 6 months at MS suck for everyone; after that, you either hate it forever or you can't ever imagine working anywhere else. At that point in my budding MS career, I was leaning towards the former. Peter, having been there, said that he'd gotten a piece of advice that had seen him through.
The advice was simple: have an agenda. The idea is, no matter what projects you work on, no matter what groups you go to, no matter what tasks you're into that day, to have an underlying agenda that pushes you forward and drives your decisions. Businesses call such a thing a "vision statement." Authors call it a "story." Whatever you call it, it's always helpful to have one and here's mine:
"Remember what it's like to not work at Microsoft."
That's it. That's my goal. Of course, as with all things, Dr. Seuss says it better than I can:
"I am the Lorax. I speak for the trees. I speak for the trees, for the trees have no tongues."I consider it my mission to speak for the thousands of developers that I've known and talked to over the years that have no tongue inside Microsoft.
This came up just this morning on the phone with a colleague of mine at MS. He said, "We need to maintain the value of X." I replied, "I don't care about the value of X. I care about enabling our customers to get the most out of our products." Of course, there are hundreds of people concerned with X inside of MS and they would be less than happy that I'd dismissed the value of it, but that didn't matter to me. What mattered was being the kind of developer advocate inside of MS that had helped me when I wasn't there and to be a constant reminder to my colleagues of the needs of those folks.
Since MS was founded by developers and run by developers (which has its pros and cons), I plan on being more successful than the Lorax.Saturday, Aug 9, 2003, 10:37 AM
Amazing Text-to-Speech
Here. Finally somebody has done a good job with text-to-speech (everyone seems to be concentrating on the other direction these days). I *so* want to hook this up to Project Gutenberg [1] and my mp3 player. [1] http://gutenberg.net/
Friday, Aug 8, 2003, 4:22 PM in .NET
Visual Studio .NET Code Generator Shim
Here. Atif Aziz built a generic VS.NET code generator shim that allows you to build a code generator that plugs into VS.NET by implementing a single method. Cool.
Friday, Aug 8, 2003, 2:12 PM
Why is a registry file called a "hive"?
Here. Raymond provides another Windows history lesson, this time about why Registry files are called "hives."
Thursday, Aug 7, 2003, 12:15 PM
Just got an invitation to BloggerCon
Here. BloggerCon is a user conference, which would be very new to me (I've only ever attended developer conferences). Have there been previous BloggerCons? If so, how have folks liked them?
Wednesday, Aug 6, 2003, 3:14 PM
FormatDesigner
Here. FormatDesigner is an application to experiment with the format strings used to format data in String.Format and various type's ToString functions.
Wednesday, Aug 6, 2003, 3:10 PM in .NET
Format Specifiers Appendix from C# in a Nutshell
Here. By request, O'Reilly and Assoc. has posted the Format Specifiers appendix from C# in a Nutshell by Drayton et al. It's a wonderful reference to the String.Format/ToString format specifiers that I'm constantly searching for on MSDN. Thanks, ORA!
Wednesday, Aug 6, 2003, 8:55 AM
P2P + DRM
Here. I hesitate to blog this because you might not believe the "my friend" part, but my friend was just downloading some stuff with Kazaa and found a bunch of it tagged with DRM. Apparently AltNet is tagging porn content with Digital Rights Management and dropping it into peer-to-peer networks. When someone finds the AltNcontent in their search, downloads it and is asked to pay some small amount of money before consuming the content. What a great way to get your content out to folks and get paid for it! Why didn't the RIAA think of this instead of suing their customers into oblivion? Those porn guys are always way ahead of their time...
Wednesday, Aug 6, 2003, 12:00 AM in Tools
.NET FormatDesigner
FormatDesigner is an application to experiment with the format strings used to format data in String.Format and various type's ToString functions.
Click here to launch the application directly (requires the .NET Framework 1.1).
Click here to download the source code.
Enjoy.
Tuesday, Aug 5, 2003, 4:25 PM in .NET
Don Box Sings
Here. You haven't lived 'til you've had Don Box call you at home to sing you the fresh lyrics from a new parody to be performed by the Band on the Runtime at the next major MS event. PDC is going to rock.
Tuesday, Aug 5, 2003, 1:40 PM
Consider offering freelance technical support
Here. Grant lays out his successful business model in a crappy IT economy, starting right away by laying it on the line for those of us having trouble getting over the old days: "I find again and again that the main barrier to re-entry in the work force for many people--not just technically-oriented folks--is a reluctance to admit that things will never be quite what they were. It's pride, mostly: they have difficulty reducing their expectations." Well-reasoned and well-written.
Tuesday, Aug 5, 2003, 9:40 AM
Howl: Windows implementation of Rendezvous(tm)
Here. Here's an open source implementation of Apple's Rendezvous(tm). I don't know what this protocol enables, but folks seemed to like it at the Applied XML Dev.Conf.
Monday, Aug 4, 2003, 9:34 AM
RSSJobs
Here. Another RSS gateway, this time for job sites. With all of the RSS "agents" I've been finding, I'm come to the conclusion that my RSS aggregator is more important than my browser. My browser displays the information but my RSS aggregator tells me there is some information of interest to me, a much harder and more important job.
Monday, Aug 4, 2003, 9:21 AM
Unskilled and Unaware of It
Here. This article was made the rounds recently because it's interesting. What makes it interesting is the conclusion (backed but tons of study): "In sum, we present this article as an exploration into why people tend to hold overly optimistic and miscalibrated views about themselves. We propose that those with limited knowledge in a domain suffer a dual burden: Not only do they reach mistaken conclusions and make regrettable errors, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it." In other words, the folks that are most incompetent don't even know it so that they can look for ways to improve themselves. Why don't they know? My take is that we're too damn polite to tell them, preferring instead to complain about them behind their backs. Is that nicer? Sure. Is it better for the incompetents of the world? No. On a lighter note, I love how the researchers go "meta" at the end of their article: "Although we feel we have done a competent job in making a strong case for this analysis, studying it empirically, and drawing out relevant implications, our thesis leaves us with one haunting worry that we cannot vanquish. That worry is that this article may contain faulty logic, methodological errors, or poor communication. Let us assure our readers that to the extent this article is imperfect, it is not a sin we have committed knowingly." : )
Sunday, Aug 3, 2003, 4:37 PM
Another Reason That Feedster Rocks
Here. When asked properly, Feedster will return search results in RSS format. That means that I can subscribe to RSS feeds for topics that I care about in the blogisphere without having to spend any time surfing to feedster.com. When combined with recent versions of SharpReader that has built in support for Feedster, I can enter a search term directly in SR, press Enter, press Subscribe, and I've got myself another "intelligent agent" to go along with the ones I'm already using [1-2]. Why doesn't Google provide their results in RSS? Anyone built an RSS gateway for Google yet? [1] http://www.sellsbrothers.com/news/showTopic.aspx?ixTopic=707 [2] http://www.sellsbrothers.com/news/showTopic.aspx?ixTopic=703