April 2008 Entries
With the exception of the developer platform and tooling products, I've been thoroughly confused with Microsoft's product strategy for a couple of years now. They've been acquiring companies at a fair steady rate, but the acquisitions have seemed fairly random.
In March of 2005 Microsoft acquired Groove Networks. This is where Microsoft picked up Ray Ozzie - the braintrust of Groove. Ray is now Microsoft's CTO
Microsoft launched its Windows Live in November of 2005. It was prettier than MSN and very startup-y in it's branding, but I believe it quickly just got thought of as a re-skinning of MSN.
At roughly the...
Its refreshing when you solve what appears to be a nasty problem with a simple and clean solution. It's an even better feeling when you solve it with Computer Science fundamentals. I solved something this morning by releaning how acces modifiers work (access modifiers in C# in my case).
We have a basic data transfer object that has some private state that handles change tracking. Something such as:
1: public class ProductDTO
2: {
3: private bool _isDirty = false;
4: private string _name;
...
I learned early in my career that typing fast and accurately were essential skills for my chosen profession. As a software developer, simple typos of a hashtable key or a file path can you cause a lot of pain. You quickly learn to leverage the Windows Clipboard with Ctlr+C and Ctlr+V. The next evolution is to use a text-substitution utility like Texter from LifeHacker.
Texter is a pretty simple concept, but extremely powerful if you take the time to work it into your personal workflow. Texter runs in your Windows System Tray and constantly listens for keywords...
Microsoft's developer division has been making a lot interesting moves lately. They're starting to finally listen to the strong thoughts and opinions coming out of the Java converts in the .NET community and realizing they know what they're talking about. As usual, they're not really innovating, but they're taking existing ideas and building some great tooling around those ideas and delivering them to the masses.
In the March release of MSDN Magazine they published Loosen Up which is a general overview of the benefits of IoC and DI. Just last week Microsoft Pattern's and Practices group released Unity...