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, Jul 12, 2004, 5:01 PM in .NET
Needed: Virtual PC Image of Longhorn 4074
Does anyone have a VPC image of Longhorn 4074 (the WinHEC Build) that they could share with me? Every time I try to install, it crashes the VPC. Normally, I wouldn't ask (I have a machine just for Longhorn), but I have the need to run the latest public and the latest internal builds. Thanks!
Sunday, Jul 11, 2004, 2:05 PM in Tools
Looking for Genghis Co-Khan
Right now, I'm holding the shared source Genghis library back. I'm acting as sole arbiter of what makes it into Genghis and how and I'm not able to keep up with the flow. I'm looking for someone who's interested in sharing this duty with me. Only proven contributors to the Windows development community need apply.
Saturday, Jul 10, 2004, 6:16 PM
Carnegie Mellon's Open Learning Initiative
Carnegie Mellon's Open Learning Initiative is a set of 5 online courses, including Causal Reasoning (I read that 3 times before I realized this wasn't "Casual Reasoning" which I think would be very popular), Chemistry, Economics, Logic and Statistics. Unlike the MIT OpenCourseWare, apparently these courses are much more interactive and community enabled. Since the MIT courses really suffer from the lack of even a per-course mailing list, I think these features are important. Plus, I love the idea of hosting the courseware in a smart client...
Saturday, Jul 10, 2004, 10:32 AM in .NET
I want Facetop for Longhorn
Facetop has been all over the web for a couple of days and I'd like to point out two things about it:
- This is exactly the kind of thing we're enabling with the advanced client capabilities in Longhorn that you just couldn't do in a web app. Until you see something like this, you don't think of it, but when you've got advanced capability in the platform, all kinds of cool stuff happens that the creator of the platform (Apple's Mac OS X, in this case) never considered. I fully expect the coolest Longhorn apps to come from someone outside of Microsoft.
- I want it!
Friday, Jul 9, 2004, 12:54 PM in .NET
Feedster Longhorn Buzz Feed
Suddenly, after having been worthless/dormant since its inception, the Feedster Windows Longhorn Buzz Feed has begun spouting useful information. Subscribed.
Friday, Jul 9, 2004, 9:45 AM in Fun
Matt Pietrek, My Hero, Starts A Blog
When I was but a wee Windows lad, my heroes were Charles Petzold and Matt Pietrek. I learned Windows 3.1 programming from Petzold (along with everyone else) and learned to love what was going on underneath from Matt. Plus, not only did Matt write Windows Internals (the title and style of which would inspire my own Internals book), but he also wrote a monthly column for the Microsoft Systems Journal, which I would lovingly read cover-to-cover every month.
So, when I went to speak at my first conference and Matt wanted to talk to me about something, I was on cloud 9 (not to be confused with Channel9). I wondered what obscure technology that I'd most recently written about on the DCOM mailing list that had caught Matt's eye. What deep COM or ATL issue did he want to take up with me? I had arrived!
The topic of Matt's conversation? The x86 Prayer that he had posted on his site had moved and he wanted to know why all of the 404s were originating from my site (I was linking to it on my Fun page). I had not arrived... : )
We've become closer since then and now Matt's got a blog. Wahoo!
Thursday, Jul 8, 2004, 11:51 AM in .NET
Richard Turner Answers Common Indigo Questions
Richard Turner, a PM on the Indigo team, answers some of the Indigo questions that came up as a result of his recent Channel9 interview, including:
- Will .NET Remoting go away any time soon? (no)
- Will Indigo Services require IIS? (no)
- We need to support Windows 2000 and XP. Can Indigo Services be hosted on these OSs? (it's not supported) Will applications running on these OSs be able to act as clients to Indigo Services? (absolutely)
- We expose some of our remoting assemblies via HTTP and host at least one in IIS. Will Indigo Services offer interoperability with these configurations? (yes) Will we be able to write an Indigo wrapper around a remoting DLL? (yes)
I've just realized that Richard has turned into my most favorite Indigo blogger. He straddles the fence nicely between what is available today and what's going to be available tomorrow. Thanks, Richard. We need you. : )
Tuesday, Jul 6, 2004, 12:20 PM in Interview
What do job interviews really tell us?
For the New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell discusses various indicators of how well interviews actually work for screening job candidates (in a phrase: not very well). The discussion of how we make our decision about someone in the first 2 seconds after seeing them and then use our future interactions with them to either reinforce our initial reaction or forgive as an aberration is particularly telling.
Tuesday, Jul 6, 2004, 12:17 PM in Interview
"Interviews are practically worthless for screening candidates."
Bram Cohen, the inventor of BitTorrent, discusses his thoughts on interviewing, include:
- "In an interview you can tell if a person is a pleasant conversationalist, and you can give some technical questions to rule out the truly inept, but beyond that you might as well be rolling dice."
- "I'd like to note that in an all-male work environment hiring an attractive female is probably good for morale."
- "Even though work history doesn't correlate with job performance, being a lying sack of shit almost certainly does."
Fun. : )
Monday, Jul 5, 2004, 8:35 AM
Raymond Chen on The Shell's Fake OLE Story
Kids these days have it so easy. They expect to do a quick search and bam! the solution is revealed. Like this post from Raymond Chen where he describes the various memory allocators exposed by the shell and COM and how they're related. When I was a boy, we had to figure these kinds of things out! And we liked it! : )
P.S. I really did used to walk to school in 3 feet of snow up hill, both ways. I didn't like that at all...
Saturday, Jul 3, 2004, 10:04 AM in .NET
Ashvil DCosta on How Longhorn Transforms Apps
Ashvil DCosta, a software professional in Bangalore writing a book on outsourcing software product development, posts his ideas about how Longhorn, particularly WinFS, will change the way we think about and develop applications.
Saturday, Jul 3, 2004, 9:57 AM in .NET
Jason Nadal on the Longhorn Speech API
"The Longhorn speech API offers baked-in functionality for voice commands inside the operating system (OS). This is a giant leap forward in the functionality provided by an OS. With the addition of an alternate user interface, products in the future may have a much different mode of interaction than currently used. Through the course of this article, the basics of voice input and output will be shown, as well as the construction of grammar, and how to act on recognition."
Thursday, Jul 1, 2004, 8:45 AM in .NET
Rob Chandler On Longhorn User Assistance Direction
Rob Chandler, a Microsoft Help MVP, has posted a look at where he sees User Assistance heading in Longhorn, both in the UI and in the new help system. I see Longhorn as an opportunity to crank user experience up a notch in every way and user assistance is an important part of that.
Wednesday, Jun 30, 2004, 6:08 PM in .NET
All About MSH:The Microsoft Shell (Codename Monad)
I'm a big cmd.exe user and was a big Korn Shell user before that, so command shells are an important part of my life and thus, I'm skeptical of new ones. However, I've been drooling over MSH (the Microsoft Shell -- codename Monad) ever since I first saw it. In fact, when I saw Karsten's post on getting the Monad bits for Windows XP and 2003, I was much excited. Then, I saw the Fundamentals Pillar topic on The .NET Show, which featured Jeffrey Snover (The Father of Monad) in the back half of the show and I was hooked. The way he told the Monad story motivated me to register for the public beta of Monad via Karsten's instructions and wait impatiently over the weekend to be awarded permissions to download the bits.
Which I promptly installed on the WinHEC build of Longhorn (build 4074), even though it's only supported for Windows XP and Windows 2003.
As it turns out, Longhorn comes with an earlier preview of Monad, but it's much older than the latest Monad drop. So, I installed the latest Monad on the latest Longhorn, hoping that it would work and that I could follow along with my new hero Jeffrey.
And follow along I did, because not only did the latest Monad bits install and run just peachy under Longhorn, but the included Getting Started docs gave me hours of fun! With the functionality that Monad provides, I'm going to have a hard time going back to anything else.
If you're a command-line person, I recommend getting on the Monad beta, taking it for a spin and letting those guys if there's anything you don't like (for example, I miss the "start" command, but I think I'll go build it...).
Wednesday, Jun 30, 2004, 5:10 PM in Fun
"If I Could Thunk Once A Day, I'd Be Happy"
Carl Franklin posts a fun segment from Michael Feldman's Whad'ya Know? radio program where 32-bit to 16-bit thunking is discussed.