April 2005 Entries

Post-mortems

If you're not familiar with them "post-mortems" are meetings where you go over a project or something and think about the good, the bad, and the ugly. The idea is to try to make changes to fix the things that didn't go well. Anyway, I find it ironic that post-mortems generally make me want to kill myself. They're just not that fun.

Post-mortems

If you're not familiar with them "post-mortems" are meetings where you go over a project or something and think about the good, the bad, and the ugly. The idea is to try to make changes to fix the things that didn't go well. Anyway, I find it ironic that post-mortems generally make me want to kill myself. They're just not that fun.

Gas prices

You may have noticed the higher gas prices over the last year or so. Looks like they're going to stay that way, which got me to thinking about all the bad things that'll happen if they continue to go up: People may consider living closer to their work They may start taking public transportation or other means of commuting People may start...

Gas prices

You may have noticed the higher gas prices over the last year or so. Looks like they're going to stay that way, which got me to thinking about all the bad things that'll happen if they continue to go up: People may consider living closer to their work They may start taking public transportation or other means of commuting People may start...

A peek inside shiproom, emphasis on 'peek'

eWeek has an article about Whidbey Shiproom (we usually call it 'Tactics' internally) that offers a peek inside the process that the division goes through when locking down and shipping. It really is a peek, too. I was disappointed to see that it was only the 2 paragraphs of the 3 page article that had anything to do with Tactics and the rest of it goes off and talks about SQL CLR in Yukon. Which is cool and all, but doesn't have much to do with Tactics...

A peek inside shiproom, emphasis on 'peek'

eWeek has an article about Whidbey Shiproom (we usually call it 'Tactics' internally) that offers a peek inside the process that the division goes through when locking down and shipping. It really is a peek, too. I was disappointed to see that it was only the 2 paragraphs of the 3 page article that had anything to do with Tactics and the rest of it goes off and talks about SQL CLR in Yukon. Which is cool and all, but doesn't have much to do with Tactics...

This sounds familiar.

So the Republican's still believe that Rossi won the Goveernor's election this past fall by 100 votes and want to take it to court. Maybe he did, maybe he didn't. But I've got two words for you guys: Florida 2000. Sucks, huh?

This sounds familiar.

So the Republican's still believe that Rossi won the Goveernor's election this past fall by 100 votes and want to take it to court. Maybe he did, maybe he didn't. But I've got two words for you guys: Florida 2000. Sucks, huh?

Stress and the Mythical Man Month as it relates to Beta 2

So our VP Soma blogged a bit about why Beta 2 missed March, which is cool. I thought I'd give a little more detail about how the last few weeks went down. One thing we've learned is that the division as a whole can't make progress on stress when there is other churn going on in the tree. For Windows Forms, our stress tests do things like create and destroy forms on 10 threads over and over again for days on end. These tests expose all kinds of things. Windows Forms bugs, weird timing cases, CLR bugs, and sometimes Windows...

Stress and the Mythical Man Month as it relates to Beta 2

So our VP Soma blogged a bit about why Beta 2 missed March, which is cool. I thought I'd give a little more detail about how the last few weeks went down. One thing we've learned is that the division as a whole can't make progress on stress when there is other churn going on in the tree. For Windows Forms, our stress tests do things like create and destroy forms on 10 threads over and over again for days on end. These tests expose all kinds of things. Windows Forms bugs, weird timing cases, CLR bugs, and sometimes Windows...

Questions about multiple threads and AppDomains in Windows Forms

There's a set of questions that come up on a regular basis from customers concerning mechanisms to partition Windows Forms applications in one way or another. We tend to get them in three basic flavors: 1) I want to improve performance by having each of my child forms/MDI child forms/UserControls running in a different thread 2) I want to improve robustness by having each of my forms in a different AppDomain ...

Questions about multiple threads and AppDomains in Windows Forms

There's a set of questions that come up on a regular basis from customers concerning mechanisms to partition Windows Forms applications in one way or another. We tend to get them in three basic flavors: 1) I want to improve performance by having each of my child forms/MDI child forms/UserControls running in a different thread 2) I want to improve robustness by having each of my forms in a different AppDomain ...