Thought Garage

What happened to Microsoft’s usability team? The color choices, particularly the single glaring white background everywhere make it appear as one giant screen instead of meaningful sections on the screen. Why dumb down so much in terms of user experience? No more round edges, gradients, shadows, contrasting backgrounds or easy on eyes highlighting.  I am not a designer, but I see an UI element communicate by its color, shape, position, contrast, focus and of course text. The new UI in 2013 definitely eliminated some of those attributes for some elements. Word 2010 vs. Word 2013 So far, the only big difference I see is the integration of SkyDrive so that documents can be readily saved in to the cloud and retrieved any where.  At another level, going towards subscriptions could be a game changer for Microsoft. But when it comes to the UI, I find it boring and am little disappointed.

So finally, its the Leap year that brought down the Windows Azure Cloud services. The root cause behind the Windows Azure Outage was found to be a simple Leap day bug.  Read more on Windows Azure blog here . When the GA creates the transfer certificate, it gives it a one year validity range. It uses midnight UST of the current day as the  valid-from  date and one year from that date as the valid-to  date. The leap day bug is that the GA calculated the  valid-to  date by simply taking the current date and adding one to its year. That meant that any GA that tried to create a transfer certificate on leap day set a  valid-to  date of February 29, 2013, an invalid date that caused the certificate creation to fail. Source : Windows Azure Blog   Isn't it a brighter spot of the whole issue that Microsoft got 4 years to fix the root cause of the issue :-))

I have been telling all this year that we couldn't find good .NET Developers. It appears, its an industry wide trend across the US. According to technology job board   Dice’s   October report, there’s one particular tech talent now in short supply across the U.S.: Microsoft’s .NET. Job postings requiring .NET are up more than 25% year-over-year, the company says – faster growth than the total job postings on all of Dice.com. -- Techcrunch   Looking for a job, make your search faster here .

One of the best info graphics that I have ever seen, and the only one on Org Charts.  Quite vividly illustrates the informal organization structure of Amazon, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple and Oracle. Just awesome.  via  Getting serious about your org chart

Let us see what tomorrow's Facebook announcement has in store for Skype. Looks like Microsoft's bets may payoff, for once. Skype 5.2 For Mac Has Arrived, Comes With Group Screen Sharing And Video Calls http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/05/skype-5-2-for-mac-has-arrived-comes-with-group-screen-sharing-and-video-calls/

I don’t know why? Majority of conferences organized by and around Microsoft Technologies, DO NOT offer RSS Feeds of their sessions and videos. For some mysterious reasons. Instead the sites offer a ridiculously tedious and stupid interface to subscribe/download session videos. It is supposedly a conference of UX Experts. “MIX is a gathering of developers, designers, UX experts and business professionals creating the most innovative and profitable consumer sites on the web.” - http://live.visitmix.com/ But when you want to watch or download session videos, there is NO RSS FEED. Instead here is what they want you to do: If you’d like to download all of the keynote and session content, download a recent build of cURL (~250K), and extract it to your folder-of-choice. Then, download MIX10Downloader.zip (1.39KB) and extract the MIX10Downloader.bat file to the same folder. From a command prompt, start MIX10Downloader by passing it one of the following parameters: WMVHIGH, WMV, MP4, PP...

If you are a budding .NET developer looking to kick start your career in 2011 or advance your career on Microsoft .NET technologies, here are two great events right here in DFW that you must attend. Windows Azure 2 Day BootCamp : 16th and 17th February 2011 This is a 2-day deep dive program to prepare you to deliver solutions on the Windows Azure Platform. We have worked to bring the region’s best Azure experts together to teach you how to work in the cloud. Each day will be filled with training, discussion, reviewing real scenarios, and hands on labs. More Details and Registration here. Dallas Day of Dot Net : 4th and 5th of March 2011 With Phil Haack kicking off the 2 day event with ASP.NET MVC 3, it got 2 days of immersive .NET programs including but not limited to “Windows phone, Azure, C# 4.0, HTML 5, Asp.Net MVC 3, WPF, Silverlight”. The event is priced at $200, but all proceeds go towards helping a cancer patient. More Details and Registration here. Live as if you were...

Microsoft’s Developer eco-system is arguably one of the best and probably lot more active than others out there. And the eco-system produces tons of multi-media content. But I always cringe when I don’t see an RSS Feed with Media Enclosures that users can readily subscribe and watch or download instantly.  Its always left to somebody to help us out. PDC 2010 web site is a nice Silverlight application.  And absolutely no HTML fall back incase somebody doesn’t have a Silverlight plugin installed.  And of course, no RSS Feed (yet) as usual. Thanks a ton to Greg Duncan for providing a full list of Videos (with all formats available) and associated RSS Feeds that you can readily subscribe.  Visit his blog post and access either the individual list or RSS Feeds of your favorite formats here .  If you want to watch those Videos on your iPad or iPhone, try MP4(low) format. Active Player If you don’t have a Media Player or Application that can consume those RS...

If you are tinkering on developing .NET Applications on Windows Mobile 7, here is a free eBook from Microsoft Press by Charles Petzold, that can get you started.  The book is available in PDF and XPS formats. Some more free e-Books for .NET Developers moving to VS 2010 here .

Windows Live Spaces, the Microsoft’s Blogging platform will be shutdown early next year (16th March to be precise) and is offering to migrate your current blog to Wordpress.com . The email I received announcing this is quite confusing. The email subject says ‘Changes coming to your Windows Live Space’. I expected that it may have been upgraded with more features.  But they are simply shutting it down, and they appear to have trouble saying it. We are very excited to announce our collaboration with a premier and innovative blogging service, WordPress.com , to offer you an upgraded blogging experience. We'll help you migrate your current Windows Live Spaces blog to WordPress.com or you can download it to save for later. On March 16th, 2011 your current space will close . With the new release of Windows Live services, we've made a series of changes and improvements across our products. We chose to partner to provide our users with a fantastic blogging solution. However...

Just noticed that with Windows Live Essentials 2011 upgrade, Windows Live Writer also gets Ribbon style interface that became so famous and productive with MS Office applications. If you have been using WLW for a while but haven’t used any MS Office applications that feature ribbon style interface, you are in for a big surprise and little bit of confusion.  If you are looking for all your Picture effects, they are split into two different sections: borders and effects. Click on Image to make these Picture tools/Format section visible.

I have installed MS Office 2010 recently on top of Windows 7. Thought I would share a few first impressions and reflections here. Simply put, Office apps are lot more visually pleasing in Office 2010 and greatly productive as they have always been. If there is one functionality I would request in MS Office, it would be the ability to publish documents in to ePub format as well. PDF support is already built in, starting from 2007. I do not know exactly when the first office was officially released, but based on Wikipedia entry, it was some time in the fall of 1990. That would mean, it’s 20 years since the first release.  Lots of things have changed since I first looked at Office applications in 1995.   Source:  Page 50, Info World, 19th November 1990 via Google Books Of all software applications I worked on, MS Excel is still the application I love the most for its power, functionality and brutal simplicity while note taking application OneNote comes second. Outl...

Just watched Velocity 2010: Aladdin Nassar, "Worldwide Inventory of Last-mile Bandwidths & Network Latencies" on Active Player . Source : Velocity 2010: Aladdin Nassar, "Worldwide Inventory of Last-mile Bandwidths & Network Latencies" from O'Reilly Velocity Conference ( Feed ) via Active Player It is totally surprising to see that Hotmail is actually better/faster in Safari browser on the Mac than any browser/OS. ( Source : PPT )

Listen to this wonderful conversation between Scott Hanselman, Martin Fowler and David Heinemeier Hansson happened back in 2007 before we ever heard of ASP.NET MVC. Transcript here . Scott sits down with Martin Fowler of Thoughtworks and David Heinemeier Hansson of 37 signals and talks about beauty, making developers happen, the death (or life) of HTML, the future of Microsoft, and asks if we should care about Rich Internet Applications. DHH is the creator of the Ruby on Rails framework, and Martin Fowler is the Chief Scientist at ThoughtWorks, well-known systems architect and Extreme Programming expert. --- Hansel Minutes   So delighted to see such a bold and open discussion between passionate developers with completely different backgrounds and ideas. Some how, this podcast explains a lots of things that were introduced in ASP.NET after 2007. Not suggesting that this has anything to do with that, but probably things must have been already moving in that direction, ...

Wondering which .NET version is the most popular version? Which .NET version got the most traction in the industry? Which version is the most discussed in the developer circles? Well, I am not sure if we have any public data that could answer any of those questions, particularly the commercial adoption part. But I looked at trends of search engine traffic and I found that these trends tell a story that is quite consistent with general perception. Look at the graph below illustrating the search trends of various .NET versions , captured from Google Trends . The story I believe is quite familiar to most .NET developers. I am not at all surprised to see .NET 1.1 still alive even in our searches, many companies are still running on .NET 1.1 and I guess haven’t found a compelling reason (that totally justify their investments) to upgrade. You can also see from the snapshot below, Visual studio editions follow the suit more or less closely along with respective .NET versions. ...

Just a few days back (on 12th, April 2010 precisely) Visual Studio 2010 was released along with .NET 4.0.  While most of the .NET developers are excited to see an improved version of .NET framework and itching to try the latest and greatest of all, it is totally a different ball game for businesses, for they prefer  and wish a stable framework that doesn’t change, well, forever. As every new version comes with a new set of challenges and often hit bottom lines pretty hard. A new version is always quite an expensive proposition Its not at all a surprising fact that even today most businesses are running their business applications on .NET 1.1 or even some still run on classic ASP. Because, more often than not, upgrading to a new version proves to be quite expensive and doesn’t offer enough benefits or improvements that justify the cost of upgrade. A new version comes about once in a year. If not a new version altogether, a new SP that fixes a whole bunch of bugs a...

Microsoft’s Augmented Reality in Bing Maps (Windows Live Maps). Going beyond the street view. Crowd sourced Photographs, photographs through the timeline and augmenting real time video, awesome. And if you just look up in the sky, you can all constellations in that space at that time. Wonderful.

Quite an interesting way to put the Journey of ASP.NET (developers) from ASP.NET Page based design to MVC based applications. Hope I am not taking it out of context. Its not explicit, but it is written all over the wall. Nevertheless, towers of abstraction and magic by Visual Studio often make developers ignore the inner workings of the framework. Its not a surprise to find an ASP.NET developer that hardly knows anything about HTML beyond the acronym and yet can still develop ASP.NET pages that really work. There are two ways to be a developer. You can be a cowboy or you can be a craftsman. A cowboy jumps right in and starts coding. A cowboy can build a software application quickly. The problem with being a cowboy is that software must be maintained over time. A craftsman is patient. A craftsman builds software carefully by hand. A craftsman is careful to build unit tests that cover all the code in an application. It takes longer for a craftsman to create an application. However, after...

Carnegie Mellon was the final stop on Microsoft Corp. founder Bill Gates' recent tour of several nationally recognized universities. As founder, chairman and former CEO of Microsoft, Gates revolutionized personal computing in the digital information age. His talk at Carnegie Mellon concluded his farewell lecture tour as he transitions from Microsoft into his new role in the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, whose mission it is to bring innovations in health and learning to the global community.

As mentioned in the article, its  a big surprises.  Microsoft releasing an application that runs on non-Windows Mobile. But Location Based Service with voice recognition is a cool application. Microsoft , purveyors of everything Windows Mobile, have just released a public version of TellMe, their new Location Based Application with voice recognition for the BlackBerry platform. TellMe is a cool little piece of software taking your GPS coordinates and providing you with search results, movie times, restaurant reviews, traffic info, and more based on your current location. As an added bonus, all of this information can be accessed with simple voice instructions, allowing you to use the software on the road without risking your spotless driving record. Currently, the software is supported on all GPS-equipped ‘Berrys, including the 8800, 8820, 8830, 8310, and we assume the 8110. Microsoft’s new LBS for BlackBerry | The Boy Genius Report