The Wayward WebLog

I am going to tell you something that will disturb you. You might laugh, but it will be a cold uncertain laugh that will haunt you as you read on, because somewhere deep down you'll know it to be true. You might brush it off, get on with your day, yet sometime later, a week or a year, it will seep back in and unsettle you to the core. From that moment on you will be changed. You will think different, act different and will fundamentally be different. So take a moment to prepare yourself now, breath deeply, clear your mind and open up to the possibility that building software is hard. Read More...

I wasn’t always a proponent of Agile development practices. To tell you the truth, I didn’t even know what they were. Before I came to Microsoft I used to just do what I was told and simply worked the way everyone else worked. Read More...

I use email a lot. I seem to be sending questions or replies to my co-workers constantly throughout the day, so you’d think I’d be very good at it. Yet even with all my years of experience communicating through this high-tech medium I still find it difficult to get an idea across without inadvertently sending the wrong message. You’ve seen it yourself, of course. Probably more so on online forums or chats where it’s easy to be misunderstood; people flaming each other over imagined slights, reading innuendos and insults into even the most innocuous comments. I used to chalk it up to problems with the medium itself, plain text. After all, it doesn’t convey the subtleties of how we normally express ourselves, it lacks gestures and inflections and so forth. Now I’m starting to see that answer as a bit too simplistic. Because I know it’s not true. Read More...

Somewhere, out in the ether is a group think that judges just how transparent any given company is. Are the posts sincere or are they just market-speak? Read More...

Apparently Xena was not the only solar body renamed this week by the International Astronomical Union. In an attempt to align all planet and dwarf planet names along the Greek pantheon theme, a group of rather overzealous and somewhat tipsy astronomers Read More...

I know I've not been attentive for a while. However, is that any reason to try and steal my crown? It looks like Charles Petzold is trying to be funnier than me. Check out his plan for a new book. He claims it's an ' Evolutionary Leap '. I'll gladly give Read More...

Everywhere I turn, all I read about is dynamic languages. Apparently, there is a small yet growing contingent of programmers that think dynamic is the only way to go. These guys are frustrated with the shackles of static type systems that force them to Read More...

I was on my way to post that my site had not actually been blocked by a foreign government, aside from all the rumors spread recently, that the truth was I had just been incredibly negligent at forming any coherent thoughts or communicating in general Read More...

Now that LINQ is out the door, so to speak, I can start focusing my efforts on the next next technology here at Microsoft. Ever since I joined up with the C# team nearly two years ago I’ve been frustrated by my inability to wax poetic about all the goodness Read More...

“LINQ is totally awesome. It’s like this thing that you use to condense your entire application into one line of demo code. Sweet!” - Stanley Morgan “LINQ is divine but DLINQ is a delinquent. It gives programmers too much power and makes programming against Read More...

Designing a programming language is like inventing a metaphor for thought. Most of the time you struggle to find just the right metaphor, hoping the one you eventually choose will be the best at communicating the idea it is meant to represent. So you Read More...

Now that the PDC announcement has been made revealing sessions covering the new C# 3.0 features causing speculation to run rampant, I figured it was time to go ahead and start outlining features of the next product. No reason to be stay focused on the Read More...

Everything always happens when I'm on vacation. I can't take a few weeks off to go snorkelling in the tropics without whidbey beta 2 sneaking out the door and into the eager hands of thousands of awaiting customers, end-users, pointy-haired managers and Read More...

In the wake of the EU rulings against Microsoft, in which the company has been ordered to remove from the windows operating system superfluous features that by their mere existence prohibit competitive products from flourishing, I believe that it is now Read More...

I thought I'd let you all know about the project I've been working on for the last few months that has unfortunately kept me away from what I like to do best. It's the eve of the MSN Search engine release and soon all the world will know what I've been Read More...