Microsoft
For reasons that are too deathly boring to go into here, I’ve changed my name on Twitter. Because I ended up creating a new profile instead of changing the name (again, for reasons not worth talking about), you’ll need to re-follow if you’re interested in what I might have to say there. New location: http://twitter.com/panopticoncntrl. Hope to see you there!
After spending a year and a half working on “M”, I’ve decided to make another change in what I’m doing and and move over to the SQL Server Programmability team. That’s the team responsible for things like the T-SQL language and runtime in SQL Server. Working on “M” was a lot of fun and the team was great, but after spending a good, long while down in the bowels of a GLR parser, I decided that that was enough and that it was time to do something else. Working on SQL Server programmability is, in some ways, a combination of...
Charles just posted a new “Expert2Expert2Expert” talk on Channel9 on “Programming Data.” This was a talk, moderated by Erik Meijer, with me and Michael Rys about data and programming and “M” and SQL Server and more. It was an enjoyable conversation but Erik did observe afterwards that I’d managed to avoid saying too much about “M” specifically! There wasn’t any mysterious intent on that one—as I said in my previous blog entry, things have been continuing to move in the “M” world and there just isn’t a lot new that I can say at the moment. Soon, hopefully, soon…
Maybe. Dare had a pointer today to a programming.reddit story that talks about competing versions of a dustup between Joel and Greg Whitten back when Joel used to work for Excel. I could care less who’s right, but the interesting implication of the story is that Joel was the one who came up with the application interface for VBA. I’m not sure that’s entirely true—a lot people worked on VBA—but if it is, he might be responsible for nearly driving a former co-worker insane. When I started at Microsoft, I worked on Access. Access used a version of...
While I was hanging out at the Addison-Wesley booth, I picked up a copy of two updated editions that I’d been eyeing. One is the updated C# Programming Language specification that includes a lot of hard work by Mads: And the other is the updated Framework Design Guidelines: Both look just awesome. I think they’re also supposed to be giving out this sooner or later: So I can hopefully pick up one of those too!
I just wanted to give a shout out to my fellow Oslo employee Vijaye Raji whose Small BASIC project just launched on the new DevLabs site. It’s a version of BASIC targeted at truly beginning programmers, and I think it’s a great example of how BASIC can be utilized to make things very simple and easy to use. I got the chance to see Small BASIC in action being taught to high schoolers and it was wonderful to see the kids start to make the connection between what they were doing and what they could do. It’s a great project,...
While I was out on vacation last week, Beth posted a video that she did at one of our language design meetings on Channel9. Check it out. If you get confused about the joke about the gray shirt, Beth also explains that on her blog. I had a little more to say in this video than I did in the one of the design meeting that I go to as a guest...
Just a little shout out to the latest project by that crazy language pimp, Erik Meijer. (He's the guy you have to thank for much of LINQ and especially for XML literals in VB.) In its own words, Volta is... [...] a developer toolset that enables you to build multi-tier web applications by applying familiar techniques and patterns. First, design and build your application as a .NET client application, then assign the portions of the application to run on the server and the client tiers late in the development process. The compiler creates cross-browser JavaScript for the client tier,...
For those readers of my blog in Japan (or who can speak Japanese), I'm being features on MSDN Japan's "Ask the Experts!" page this month. There's a short introductory video I shot, plus the opportunity to submit questions (or so I'm told) which I will answer later this month. So, if you've got something to ask, submit it and I'll be happy to answer!
Back in December, when discussing my bout of writer's block, I said that I should probably write an entry "What the Hell I Do [at Microsoft]," since I think that the question is sometimes a little murky (even to me). Most of my career I was just a "developer" or "manager," but now that I am an "architect," things are a little more complicated. As far as I can tell, "architect" is such a general title at Microsoft that it's practically meaningless. It can mean totally different things in different organizations. In my case, being an "architect" seems to mean: I've...
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