Marquee de Sells: Chris's insight outlet via ATOM 1.0 csells on twitter

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.



Wednesday, Mar 29, 2006, 11:27 AM in Tools

Tell me about your troubles and woes configuring, deploying and maintaining distributed .NET apps

Believe it or not, Microsoft is always trying to improve its products and to do so, I find we do our best work when we actually ask our potential customers what they think.

In this case, I’d like to know what “pain points” you experience when configuring, deploying and maintaining distributed .NET applications. That can be any kind of app, whether it’s a client-side app that phones home for code or data updates or whether it’s a fully distributed grid or anything in between. Please be as specific as possible and, if you’d like one of our courteous technical people to follow-up, make sure to include contact info.

Use this as an opportunity to vent – don’t hold back. Remember: the life you save may be your own…

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Wednesday, Mar 29, 2006, 6:59 AM in Tools

Gengis for .NET 2.0

Genghis has been updated for .NET 2.0 and is available from the Genghis workspace. Enjoy.

Update: The following controls have been added to Genghis in the .NET 2.0 version:

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Sunday, Mar 26, 2006, 1:52 PM in Tools

I'm with Scott -- I Love Monad

I fell in love w/ the potential of monad a while ago w/ Jeffrey Snover's original Channel9 video, but I was too lazy to download it onto all of my machines. However, after seeing Jeffrey's talk at TechDays 2006 in Switzerland (and remembering that monad is installed by default w/ the WinFX SDK, so it was already on all my machines), I took the dive (starting with kiping Jeffrey's personal copy of "Monad," from ORA, Andy Oakley's most excellent monad intro) and I've been doing it pretty much non-stop on the train and on the plane all the way home. Like Scott, I'm loving it.

I've built several scripts, including start-process (to act like cmd.exe's "start" command -- invoke-item doesn't work on URLs), find-file, find-filebytext, find-dir and format-notepad. So far, no luck on format-clipboard, i.e. dropping the results of an operation into the clipboard, but I'm having a blast trying.

Monad is the command line I've missed so much from my ex-life under Unix. Give it a try! You'll love it.

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Wednesday, Mar 22, 2006, 10:56 AM

Greetings from Switzerland

Hello from the fabulous Victoria-Jungrau Hotel in Interlaken, Switzerland, where Mel and I have just landed after three days in a much dinkier hotel in Rome (and although it was just a block away from the Vatican, I never ran into the pope at any of the local eateries or pubs...). I tried to post from the coin-operated Unix machine in our hotel basement last night, but the browser didn't like the POST involved in adding new content to my site (or maybe it was the alt-shift-left knee to get the @ sign to appear on the Italian keyboard...).

This hotel room is nicer than our house, as evidenced by the fact that Mel made me take my jacket off the bed so that she could get “pristine” shots (including from an elevated position in the bathroom). They always treat us so well in Switzerland. Highly recommended.

This is my first real connected experience since boarding the plane Sunday morning (I don't care how cool Outlook Web Access is -- it ain't nearly so cool as the Windows version), although I was able to get my cell phone to download my emails. I can't image what that bill will be like...

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Thursday, Mar 16, 2006, 8:36 PM in The Spout

I just watched my son learn to fear the computer

When kids are young, they have no fear of computers or anything else. My eldest, when he was 2.5, knew how to detect what OS he was running (I dual booted Win2K and Win95 at the time), remember which OS his games needed, reboot, choose the non-default OS from the boot menu and start his app like it was the most natural thing in the world. Even though he couldn't read, he learned all of the functionality of the app by choosing all of the menu items and pressing all of the toolbar icons just to see what they did. He had no fear.

Tonight, my youngest was working in Word, writing a paper that's due tomorrow (of course). After he was finished digging through the thesaurus on the right-hand side, he wanted to close that part of the window, but accidental pressed the X to close the document he was working on (which, of course, he hadn't saved). When he was asked if he was sure, he thought he was being asked if he was sure he wanted to close the thesaurus, so he pressed "Yes."

The moment his document disappeared is when he learned to fear the power of the computer to throw away his work.

What did he do wrong? How do I explain it to him? What did we do wrong as an industry to teach my son to fear a tool meant to help?

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Wednesday, Mar 15, 2006, 2:23 PM in Fun

Ninja's Need Love

I love the internet. Where else would you see a video of a ninja answering letters about love?

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Saturday, Mar 11, 2006, 2:15 AM in The Spout

My $366 Vista PC

This morning, I read about a $159 computer from a review on the PC Magazine site:

I called my local Fry's, and while they were no longer have the $159 sale (apparently "quantities are limited"), they would be willing to sell me one for $171. While I was there, I got a 1GB memory upgrade and a 256MB ATI graphics card. Here's the equipment I went home with:

I then added an LCD panel and a DVD drive I had laying around. Total cost $365.97.

When I got the PC, it came pre-installed with Lindows, the Linux distro meant to look and act like Windows. And I gotta say, it wasn't too bad. Then, because they ship a free CD that runs directly w/o an install, I plugged in Ubuntu, another popular client-side Linux distro which was also surprisingly easy to use. Neither was as familiar as Windows XP, of course, but they were both a lot easier to use then the last time I ran Linux.

At 12:04am, I started the Vista Feb '06 CTP installation. At 12:44am, I was running Vista, it having recognized all of hardware (except the sound device) from my $366 PC, including enabling those cool "glass" effects and the nifty animations, integrated search and all the neat things you've read about in the Vista reviews.

I know I work for "the man," but even so, I'm seriously impressed. The install was fast and seamless. The performance is way better than I thought it would be. And the little UI tricks are fabulous. I can't do any media stuff 'cuz my audio device wasn't recognized, but it was cool when I tried to play video and a DVD, that the Vista Media Center UI came up (my complete home entertainment needs are served with a coupla TVs, a Media Center PC and an XBox).

I know, I know, I got the OS for free, but come on! It's still beta and it runs great on my cheapo PC! I don't know what Vista's going to go for, but I bet the whole she-bang (including LCD panel and DVD drive) could be had for ~$500 when Vista ships. Plus, I've only been playing with it for about an hour, but I already don't want to go back to my XP boxes...

P.S. This post was composed and posted from "visto," my new Vista PC.

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Friday, Mar 10, 2006, 11:17 AM in Fun

Zombie MMORPG

Here.

I love this idea!

"Exanimus is an online massively multiplayer game created in a world where the dead live and roam the earth eating the flesh of the living. While most of the world is dead, there are small pockets of survivors that exist in barricaded cities across the globe."

You guy will kill me before I change, right?

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Thursday, Mar 9, 2006, 8:20 AM in Fun

I'm *loving* the new live.com images search

Live.com has a new image search which does progressive showing of images, scaling of the group and individual photos in very cool ways, but the killer feature is when you surf to the page from whence the image comes, the image is shown in full size hovering above the page. Very slick. My only complaint is that there seems to be no way to do an image search w/o first doing a normal search and then pressing the "Images" button. Still, I've switched from a9.com and google.com image search.

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Tuesday, Mar 7, 2006, 5:20 PM in Tools

ClickOnce + FireFox

If you're having trouble with ClickOnce while using FireFox as your default browser, then this post is for you. Thanks, Saurabh!

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Friday, Mar 3, 2006, 5:32 PM in Fun

Fabulous Half-Life 2 Comic

Here's a tip -- if you've got a deadline, don't wander over to the Half-Life 2 comic "Concerned." I'm a *huge* Half-Life and Half-Life 2 fan, so when I heard about it, I went right over and now that's two hours of my life I'll never get back (but were oh so pleasantly spent) reading all 120 comic strips front to back. Since I've been spending my evenings and weekends playing Half-Life 2 again (why oh why aren't there any more good games?!?), all of the stuff in these comics is fresh in my mind. Plus, I don't mean "comic inspired by Half-Life 2;" the guy actually posing characters and objects from the game using a Half-Life 2 mod and builds his comics out of the screen shots, adding hilarious prose. It's like if Rory built his comics from "Stick Figure World 3D" (coming soon to XBox 360). Very highly recommended.

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Sunday, Feb 26, 2006, 4:33 PM in Tools

Hello from ASP.NET 2.0

I ported sellsbrothers.com to ASP.NET 2.0 a while ago, but I wasn't happy with the experience, so I didn't pull the trigger on moving it to a production environment. I'm glad I waited. I ported the site again last night using the VS05 Web Application Project preview and it worked a treat. Recommended.

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Saturday, Feb 25, 2006, 10:59 PM in The Spout

testing

1.2.3...

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Saturday, Feb 25, 2006, 7:28 PM in The Spout

PM Skill #9: Learn From The Masters

Of course, when you're learning to do something, whatever it is, you should check out how a lot of different folks do it. For example, the author of The Game learned to be a PUA from a variety of sources. One PUA guru of PM love is Brad Abrams and he regularly spills his guts onto his blog (plus, you've got to love his numbering scheme...):

Enjoy!

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Friday, Feb 24, 2006, 3:20 PM in The Spout

PM Skill #8: Give Credit Freely

Engineers are people, too, and appreciate pats on the back as much as anyone. In fact, many of us are so socially needy that we're willing to trade "attaboys" for money (and hence the fuel that drives the OSS community).

The beauty: praise is cheap. Blocks of plastic, plaques, bowling night morale events, etc, all cost money and can be the cause of derision as often as pride. On the other hand, sincere praise freely given doesn't cost a thing, but it's often much more appreciated.

So why doesn't praise happen more often? I think one reason is because we're engineers, so we're trained to focus on where our work falls short, often completely ignoring when it lives up to expectations. Also, sadly, it's not uncommon for folks to want to take credit for themselves . However, as PMs, we have to remember that just because we give the presentation or write the status email doesn't mean that we did the work. We need to be explicit about giving credit.

So, the next time you're giving a talk, don't say "And this feature does ..." say "This feature, which Pete implemented, does this..." When you're writing that status email, don't say "We implemented feature XXX this week...," say "Carol and Joe implemented feature XXX this week..." As soon as you do this, Pete, Carol and Joe know that you appreciate their work and that whoever you're communicating with knows that they did good things. Appreciated team members are happy team members.

So, does that mean you should praise things you don't necessarily appreciate, just to keep your team motivated? Absolutely not. As soon as the praise sounds empty, you've done more harm than saying nothing at all. Definitely look for opportunities to give credit, but don't make stuff up that you don't believe.

But what do you do to get praise for your own work if you're busy doing all of this praising of your team mates? Nothing. Praise from yourself is called "bragging" and it makes you look stupid (I know this because I struggle w/ this constantly). Give your praise freely and let others do the same. If you're effective, people will say good things and that'll be enough.

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