Microsoft

Did Joel Spolksy nearly drive my coworker insane?

Paul Vick — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 23:14:56 GMT

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 BASIC called Embedded Basic (or EB) for its programmability story. EB may not have been perfect, but I always thought it was a really nice language engine—it was small, it was fast, and it worked really well with Access and its programming model. After Access 1.0 shipped, however, EB was discontinued in favor of VBA which was the new official programmability story for Microsoft. There were a few people left on EB whose job, as far as I could tell, were just to tell me “no” when I came to them and asked them to fix bugs. (My interactions with the EB team at this point inspired my program manager to tell me that one of my special skills seemed to be “being able to tell people to f**k off, but in such a nice way that there’s nothing they can say in return.” Suffice it to say, I didn’t have a great relationship with the EB folks.)

By the time we got to Access 95, we knew we had to move over to VBA. The head of the project stopped by and asked me if I was interested in maybe leading the effort to switch over to VBA. In what I can only describe as an extreme fit of sanity, I declined. Another coworker took on the job. Suffice it to say, it was nearly a complete disaster. VBA was designed to work well with Excel, which had a totally different storage, execution, and debugging model than Access. As a result, almost everything having to do with programmability had to be redesigned, often in some pretty hairy ways. From the outside, it seems like a miracle that it ever worked, much less worked well.

As you can imagine, this was pretty hard on my coworker, who was responsible for getting this working in Access. As I remember, the VBA team at the time (Joel was gone by that point, I think) was somewhat sympathetic but not overly helpful—after all, they worked really well with Excel and we had all these “weird” requirements. Anyway, I knew things weren’t going well when my coworker came into my office and told me, “I found this really stupid bug that I made, so I decided to rename all the local variables to say insulting things about me.” Then one day I came in to work and found my coworker wasn’t there. When I asked where he was, I was told that he’d been ordered to take several days off and fly to Vegas to unwind for a while. I believe they were worried he might totally go off the deep end.

In the end, though, we shipped, my coworker did not go insane, and everything ended up OK. But it’s interesting to think what might have happened…

Scored some updated Addison-Wesley books

Paul Vick — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 01:32:00 GMT

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!

Let’s get small…

Paul Vick — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 19:13:00 GMT

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, and I hope it goes far!

Design meeting Channel9 interview...

Paul Vick — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 20:17:00 GMT

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...

Volta released...

Paul Vick — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 04:10:00 GMT

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, web services for the server tier, and communication, serialization, synchronization, security, and other boilerplate code to tie the tiers together.

Although my focus continues to be on client programming by directly emitting IL for the runtime, I think Volta has some extremely interesting ideas contained within it. I'll be interested to see how this project fares, especially given the success of his previous ideas...

Ask me something in Japanese, please...

Paul Vick — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 20:21:00 GMT

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!

What do I actually do...?

Paul Vick — Wed, 04 Apr 2007 22:45:00 GMT

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 been around a long time.
I'm a developer (more or less).
I don't manage anybody.

(For those paying close attention, my title when I started this blog was "Technical Lead," which was an even more meaningless term, especially since I used to be a "Technical Lead" on Access when I was much, much, much more junior. And I believe that my title will soon change to "Principal Architect," which only means that if you're an internal Microsoft person, you'll have a general idea of what my career ladder level is.)

I should also be clear that I am an architect working on Visual Basic, not the "architect of Visual Basic." There are at least three other people who work on Visual Basic that share the title of "architect" with me, all of whom do wildly different things. Basically, we're just a bunch of senior developers who didn't want to manage people but were useful enough to keep around anyway.

So that's my title, but what do I actually do? Well, my standard cocktail party answer is "go to meetings and write emails." And (very) occasionally write blog entries. However, if you wanted to pin me down a bit more, I tend to spend my time doing the following:

Attending language design meetings. We tend to have two hour design meetings every week on Monday and Friday to talk about Visual Basic language design. This is where we hash out new ideas, work through details, and deal with followup issues. With where we are in Orcas, it's mostly followup issues at this point, but we should start gearing up to do some early thinking about post-Orcas soon.
Writing the language specification. This is a seasonal activity, so to speak, since it's really only done later in the release cycle when the various individual feature specifications have settled down. It's sort of a last formalization step for all the features and a chance for me to do a pass through everything we've decided. I'm actually just about to start this for Orcas.
Doing community stuff. This includes blogging, going to conferences and giving talks. I don't do a huge amount of this in any one year, but it's something I'm trying to do more of.
Writing code. Amazingly enough, I still do this. It tends to be what we call "long-lead" work, though, stuff that's maybe a little further than prototype but not real production. For example, I did a lot of work on getting the first couple of LINQ CTPs (the pre-Orcas CTPs) out the door. And I'm doing a lot of work right now on some other code that might appear a little at MIX and (I hope) a lot more at the PDC.
Answering questions. As the longest serving member of the language team, I get a lot of random questions from people about design questions, past and present.
Talking to other teams. Whatever I'm working on usually interacts with other teams in some way, shape or form. With LINQ, I spent a lot of time talking with the C# team and SQL team. With the stuff I'm working on now, I'm spending a lot of time talking with other teams. Coordination is frequently the name of the game.
Trying madly to keep up with my email. Like the rest of the universe.

Of course, what anyone does at Microsoft always tends to be a moving target, so I'm sure I can write this same entry each year and it'll be a little different each time. I guess that's what keeps life interesting!

For Jim Gray, wherever we may find him...

Paul Vick — Sun, 04 Feb 2007 02:28:00 GMT

Being on parental leave and not that up-to-date on the world, I wasn't aware of the disappearance of Jim Gray until this morning, when I opened my New York Times and saw a familiar face, much to my surprise. (The last and only other time that happened, someone who was in my class in college had won a Pulitzer.) I don't really know Jim well, but have crossed paths with him more than a few times in the past several years. The latest was my trip to Japan for the launch of VS 2005 and SQL Server 2005, where I did the VS keynote and Jim did the SQL Server keynote. For someone who has done so much amazing work in the computing field, I found Jim to be an amazingly down-to-earth, gracious and friendly guy. I'm not at all surprised by the outpouring of concern and effort on the part of the computing industry to help find him.

I can only hope that he will be found alive and well. My thoughts are with him and his family.

Localized programming languages

Paul Vick — Tue, 12 Sep 2006 20:00:00 GMT

Omer van Kloten's entry on Internationalization of Programming reminded me of a (possibly apocryphal) story that I was told when I started working on OLE Automation. I asked why IDispatch::GetIDsOfNames takes an LCID and was told that once-upon-a-time, the VBA team conducted an experiment in localization with VBA in Excel (which was the first application to host VBA). Apparently, they attempted to localize the entire language--keywords, function names, etc.--into French, and possibly other languages. This mean you could write code along the lines of what Omer outlines in his entry, except in French instead of Dutch.

The problem was that because VBA wasn't exactly compiled in those days, the Excel spreadsheet that you wrote your code in now depended on having localized Excel on the machine. If you sent your spreadsheet to your colleague in New York, they couldn't run the macros because their English Excel didn't understand the language...

"Want to build a compiler?" redux.

Paul Vick — Sun, 16 Jul 2006 19:32:00 GMT

Interested in working for Microsoft? Want to build a compiler? Want to work on the coolest programming language ever? (Note for the humor-impaired: that last statement includes an implicit self-deprecating wink and a smile.) Don’t want to mange managers? We’ve also opened a new position on the compiler team that involves working directly on the compiler/language and doesn’t require managing people:

Want to help chart the future of one of the most popular programming languages in the world? Interested in building a highly interactive tool that brings programming to the masses and makes professional programmers even more productive at the same time? Want to work on melding dynamic language and scripting concepts into a statically typed language? The Visual Basic development team is looking for a highly motivated software development engineer to work on future versions of the Visual Basic language. Responsibilities include:

Working with the language design team to help design new features for Visual Basic.

Planning, scheduling, and developing those new features.

Helping to develop the infrastructure used to build and test the product.

The ideal candidate will have a minimum of a B.S. in Computer Science/Software Engineering and 4 years of industry practice. A background in compiler architecture, database technology, and/or Microsoft .NET Framework usage is a plus. If you’re ready to step up and join a dynamic, fast-paced team which delivers high-quality development tools to millions of customers, we’re waiting for you!

Here’s a link to the actual listing.