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 24, 2004, 9:53 AM
BradA on GC fun in Whidbey
Brad Abrams posts a nice, consise description of two tweaks to the GC that Whidbey provides to enable developers to handle unmanaged resources in their .NET objects better. Check it out.
Tuesday, Mar 23, 2004, 10:28 PM in The Spout
The Next Big Leap in "Programming"
Tonights Portland Nerd Dinner was a barn-burner. Not only did we have the typical geek banter and laughter, but we spend some time on the question I posed the other day about what should replace character stream-based programming.
The problem is that all of the hand-crafting of solutions doesn't scale. The answer was posed by a fellow nerd who, who pointed out that we've already got a model for self-organizing, self-evolving, self-maintaining systems: biology. God didn't hand code humans and zebras and platypi -- he defined a class and instance encoding method (DNA) and an environment to serve as the runtime (Earth) and let us interact with and improve ourselves and our environment over time to solve the problem. What's the problem? What species survives best on this planet. So far, we're the winners, but we'll see what happens at the next ice age or when the next asteroid hits.
.NET and Longhorn have provided us a big step forward in terms of hand-crafting computer-based solutions to our problems, but only self-organizing, self-evolving, self-repairing systems can really scale. I know that IBM has done some work in this area with their automonic computing, but my personal favorite work on this topic is Genetic Programming III by John Koza. Anyone for a Genetic Algorithm Runtime (GAR)?
Monday, Mar 22, 2004, 5:02 PM
"Meet the Man Behind the Marquee"
I don't think the interview covers how my blog got it's name, but how can I quibble when I get a rare link from the ever watchful Mary Jo Foley, and one so eloquently titled to boot!
Sunday, Mar 21, 2004, 10:34 AM
A Service The USPS Could Use to Trump FedEx
So long as the post office would toss the junk mail and I could switch my utilities to email from the source, I'd happily pay $.22/letter to get my snail mail in email earlier. Come to think of it, I'd pay them just to drop my junk mail...
Sunday, Mar 21, 2004, 10:05 AM
New IE Security Features in XPSP2
Tony Screiner is spending the next week or so covering the new security features that XPSP2 includes for IE, starting today with the new Authenticode dialog (which is very reminiscent of what's coming in Whidbey's ClickOnce and in Longhorn). Subscribed.
Sunday, Mar 21, 2004, 9:58 AM
GUI Interface Gallery
Looking for old screenshots of Windows 3.0 or BeOS or MacOS? Tim Tabor posted a nice web site dedicated to capturing screenshots from as many OS GUIs as possible, including desktops and icons.
Saturday, Mar 20, 2004, 11:47 PM in The Spout
Programming Stinks
As much as I love writing code, I realized long ago that it's really the act of bending my computer to my will that I really love. Programming's just the only way to really do that. After a few decades, you'd have thought we'd have come up with something better. Our industry's pioneers agree that programming is holding us back, but don't really know what we'll use to replace it. Ideas?
Saturday, Mar 20, 2004, 11:29 PM
What About the Raw Sex Appeal?!?
Sure, sure, Microsoft men have steady paychecks and are level-headed, but why is it that women don't want us for our animal charisma and indeflatable stamina? I believe it was the Nerds movie that featured the quote, "All jocks think about are sports. All nerds think about is sex." : )
Saturday, Mar 20, 2004, 11:22 PM
MapPoint Web Service Free for MSDN Subscribers
If you haven't done any MapPoint programming yet, you really should. I had a ball at it and now the MapPoint web service is free for the first year if you're an MSDN Universal, Enterprise or Professional subscriber.
Friday, Mar 19, 2004, 10:51 PM in The Spout
Review: Hell House
NetFlix brought "Hell House" to my house the other day and I just finished watching it (in fact, the credits are still rolling).
Hell House is the name of a specific kind of "haunted house" exhibit that some churches run every year at Halloween. This movie is a documentary of the church that originated the practice and is in it's 10th year, having had 75,000 guests over that period. The hook is that the church puts on little mini-plays showing real-life horrors, e.g. domestic abuse, rape, murder, drunk driving, abortion and, sin-of-sins, homosexuality (which doesn't hurt anyone, of course, but gets them on the news every year).
At the end of each tour through the Hell House scenes is a room with a member of the church applying age old used car salesman techniques to pressure people into converting or recommitting to the church. There success rate is 20%, which is why hundreds of churches around the country have adopted this practice.
It amazes me that such a thing actually happens. The techniques they use reminds me of a cross between the horror movies we was made to watch in driver's ed and the pressure our society puts on our children to believe in Santa. Don't cults get into trouble for this kind of thing? Truth is truly stranger than fiction.
Friday, Mar 19, 2004, 9:32 PM in The Spout
Have Some of WinFS Today
I have absolutely fallen in love with X1. I don't search my email, attachments or file system anymore; I just type a few character into filter fields until the results have narrowed enough to show me what I was looking for. This is but a small part of what WinFS is going to enabled and it already saves me hours/month. Highly recommended.
Friday, Mar 19, 2004, 8:30 PM in Fun
Today I Met A Lady Named "Friend"
Tracey Friend is an MS recruiter and she called to talk to me about some stuff I'm working on that could attract some fresh meat (and she also told me some stuff that sent shivers up my spine, but that's another story : ).
Tracey was very friendly, just like all of the MS recruiters that I've met. In fact, MS recruiters are getting so friendly, that now HR is blogging. What's next? Giving away the source? : )
Friday, Mar 19, 2004, 8:11 PM in Interview
HR Bloggers
I've heard for years that MS HR uses my site as part of their internal HR training, although I've never heard it from the HR folks themselves. Until now.
On Wednesday, Heather Hamilton, an MS recruiter, said that my "site is legendary, especially here in staffing."
On Monday, Zoe Goldring, also an MS recruiter, said "Net/Net Chriss site is great. Plus I respect the fact that he doesnt give the answers to the questions!"
And, to top it off, they're even bloggers, and they provide a whole host of interesting info for folks interested in interviewing at Microsoft. Certainly, I'd trust anything you read on their blogs far more than the stuff on this one, most of which was obtained far before I ever worked at MS.
Thursday, Mar 18, 2004, 11:18 PM in .NET
WinFS Scenario #4: Easing Development Process 2
Dan Crevier from the Office team pines for WinFS when they were implementing Mac Office 2004.
Thursday, Mar 18, 2004, 3:19 PM in .NET
Brent's Chapter 6: Indigo
Read chapter 6 of Introducing Longhorn for Developers, where Brent dives into the Indigo pillar of Longhorn, including an architectural overview, programming web services, programming remote objects, securing Indigo endpoints, reliable and durable messages and transactions.