BrandonLive

Ever since I built my first PC at age 11 (a scant 9 or so years ago) my family and friends have joked with me, “Since you’re going to work for Microsoft someday, remember to tell them…”

Naturally, I forgot all but the most common one, which was something along the lines of “stop sucking.”

Oddly enough, no one seems as surprised as I am.  It’s not so much that I’m surprised at the notion of me working for Microsoft… that seems natural enough given my interests.  What I still can’t believe is that it’s happening now. 

So yeah, I’m going to work for Microsoft/MSN.  And I couldn’t be more excited!!  I relish the opportunity to do something I love and improve the experiences of millions of users and work at such an amazing place with amazing people.  They’re even going to pay me to do it! 

What’s more, I get to move to Seattle/Redmond – which I absolutely fell in love with during my two recent trips.  Guess it’s time I learn the Seattle native language.

I’ll be filling an S/DET role at MSN.  Two points if you can guess what I’ll be working on 😉

I haven’t used Yahoo in ages.  But this shows promise.  Why?

1) Search clustering and filtering (and pivoting around individual results) are all ideas that I pushed heavily amongst the Search Champs.  The fact that Yahoo is doing work in this area shows that they aren’t content to follow Google or MSN every step of the way.  They understand that to beat Google, you can’t just be “about as good.”  If you want to beat Google, you have to change the way people search.  MSN Search right now reminds me a bit of John Kerry.  It’s saying “Look at me!  I’m as good as Google, but I’m not Google!  Pick me!“

Also, Google can play around with “extras” because they’re in the lead.  The other players can’t afford to get caught up in the little things… they need to think big.  They need to, pardon the phrase, think different.

2) Yahoo is being more transparent.  Like Google’s “Google Labs” page, and MSN’s “Sandbox” effort – Yahoo is letting you see (and experience) what they’re working on.  On one hand, I applaud this.  On the other hand, it isn’t the kind of revelation I described above… But rather, it’s a necessity if they want to compete in this market.

3) The “AJAX“ approach rocks.  I love sites that update/change their content without having to refresh the entire page.  Hotmail needs to do this ASAP.

4) They bought Flickr… so they’ve already been on my good side as of late 🙂

http://mindset.research.yahoo.com/

It took a little longer than expected to get ready, but it’s here.

Head on over to Extended64.com to see the guide.  It includes an MSI file with some simple tools that will help you switch between the 32-bit and 64-bit shell, as well as make working in the 32-bit shell a bit easier.

At this point I’m still labelling this as an experimental hack and nothing more.  If you don’t understand what you’re doing, don’t do it!   Wait until braver souls have tried it out and found all the issues that I may have missed.

Oh, and there’s a forum for this hack at E64 now, so you can post all your questions/feedback/ideas and what not.  So get to it!

Dare wrote a post with the title Microsoft Missing the Boat on Programming Language Trends.

Coincidentally (or not?  Maybe Dare read my mind) – I was preparing to write an entry with almost exactly the same title!  My topic is a bit different.  Dare wrote about how Microsoft has neglected certain types of languages (scripting, VB, etc), and appears to have been inspired by Chris Anderson’s post.

I’m certain that they’re both right.  No doubt about it, Microsoft has been blindly focused on C# (and to a lesser extent, Managed C++ and VB .NET) for a while now. 

However, my concern hasn’t been what type of language they’ve been ignoring, but rather what kind of developer they’ve been ignoring.  So who have they forgotten about?  My friends. 

Dear Microsoft,

Many of my friends, both here in Albany/Troy, and back at the University of Rochester, are computer geeks.  More than a few are CS students.  Guess how many of them have Visual Studio on their computers… That’s right, none.  Now guess how many of them use Emacs or Xcode?  Yeah, pretty much all of them.

Microsoft needs their own Emacs type of program.  Or their own Xcode.  The “Visual Studio Express” products sounded promising to me at first.  But then I discovered they’re just replacements for what used to be “Standard Edition” products.  In other words, they’re not entirely lightweight, they’re not especially flexible (one product per language), and they aren’t free.

Microsoft has arguably the best development suite on the planet.  But they aren’t using that to attract young, up-and-coming developers to their platform.  They’re also neglecting hobbyists.

Back at U of R, they start CS students with Java.  One or two people might download JCreator, but upwards of 90% of the class always uses Emacs for their Java development.  Most of them SSH into a Unix server to do it, but some (especially those running Linux or OS X) run it on their own computers.

So what am I asking for?

I’d like to see Microsoft release a language-agnostic source editor like Emacs, with some of their spiffy Visual Studio features, and include it on the Windows disc.  It should support all the major languages out of the box:  C/C++, C#, Java, and maybe VB/VB.NET.  Although I’d understand if they were relunctant to include Java support.  But even if they don’t, the tool should still let you write Java code and do all the basic stuff that Emacs always does (indenting, parenthesis matching, etc).  And you should be able to point it at whatever compiler you want to use.

It should also include the basic MS C/C++ and C# compilers.  Add in some basic debugging code if you want.  But it doesn’t really even need to be a full-fledged IDE.  All we need is an editor.  Notepad is severely lacking.  They can call it “Microsoft Editor” or something, to fit with their usual no-nonsense (no-creativity) naming scheme.

Make it run on all versions of Windows and make it freely downloadable today.  Then (and this is the tough part), put it somewhere in that extra 3.4GB of space you have on the Longhorn DVD.

Just do what Emacs and Xcode do for Linux/BSD and OS X… and keep it simple.  It won’t compete with Visual Studio in any significant way… it will just be a path for students/hobbyists to eventually get to VS. 

Oh, and bring back FrontPage Express.  Make it just like FrontPage 2003 without the WYSIWYG portion.  Just the code editor.  That part rocks.  Maybe give it a better name than FrontPage Express, though.  You can call it Microsoft Editor HTML Edition 2005 for all I care.  Actually scratch that, the Microsoft Editor I already told you to build should be able to handle that functionality just fine.

For some reason it was making my blog load really really slowly sometimes.  Unfortunately I’m kind of limited in terms of places where I can put it seeing as I don’t own the server, and only work with the tools they so graciously provide me 🙂

But yeah, performance for those that come by way of browser should be improved.

http://desktop.msn.com

Download away 🙂

Also, http://addins.msn.com is up as well.

64-bit users will find that Windows x64 Editions are not supported in this release.  HOWEVER:

Watch here or Extended64.com for more on that.

Microsoft/MSN will be releasing their new MSN Toolbar along with what is now called “Windows Desktop Search” within the next few hours.

I’ve been working with near-final bits for a little while now (as part of the Search Champs program) and I must say I’m very impressed with how they’ve listened to customer feedback and incorporated changes so very quickly.

Examples: 

-The “Prioritize Indexing“ option, so that those of us with excess computing power can have the index always instantaneously up-to-date.
-The ability to specify which Outlook folders should be indexed.
-Much better developer support and documentation (and they’ve got more of that in the works as well).
-Much cleaner UI, better performance, and countless bug fixes.
-Far more advanced options exposed in the configuration UI.

They even let you change the default web search to something other than MSN Search!  How incredibly un-monopolistic 🙂

As you might have guessed, I’ve been waiting for this release to show you more of the work I’ve been doing.

Watch http://desktop.msn.com for the release, which I’m told should be up within the next couple hours.

If you remember my Search Champs trip, you might remember that Seattle was uncharacteristically lacking of percipitation.  Having watched Weather.com over the last few days, I’ve been given the impression that it’s been pretty rainy here since then.  It’s a lie.  The weather is perfect today.  As far as I’m concerned, it never rains in Seattle.  They just want you to think that.

The forecast says no rain tomorrow or Thursday, but then four years of flooding right after I leave.  Okay, maybe not four years, but as far as they can predict.  More deception, methinks.

Here are a few things that I’m working on:

1) A simple plug-and-play add-in that you can use to build a Windows application that hosts results from MSN’s desktop search, as I’ve shown in screenshots before.

2) A package that makes MSN’s desktop search much more useful on Windows x64 systems.  I’m looking into options for achieving shell integration with 64-bit Explorer (Deskbar, etc).  I should be able to have a basic 64-bit deskbar soon, but without the advanced shortcut functionality (it will initially be just for search queries). 

3) Much more 64-bit stuff.  I’ve been talking with Ryan Hoffman of Extended64 about some ideas there.  I recently switched back to Windows x64 with newfound determination to make things work that currently don’t.

But right now I’m back in Seattle for a couple days, so for the most part I won’t be doing any work on that stuff until the end of the week.