Entries tagged with ms personalities - Channel 9

Jillian Venters - A Goth inside the Deathstar

Charles — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 17:08:00 GMT

Jillian Venters is a technical editor for ASP.NET within the developer division, editing documentation for Visual Web Developer to ensure all text and copy is clear and concise. With a diverse background in games and music engineering, Jillian is another fantastic example of how you can have a happy and successful career at Microsoft without being a hard-core programmer or developer. But, even more interesting (at least for Ritzy) is that Jillian is a full-fledged Goth. What’s a Goth, you ask? Goth has roots back to the 1700’s, the current incarnation is an off-shoot of the punk and new wave movement that includes influences from Victorian mourning clothing, so good they’re bad horror movies, Dracula and more. Guess what else? Goths aren’t just disgruntled teens trying to upset mom and dad! Lots of adults are Goths (there’s a formal group of them at Microsoft), and as Jillian describes one of the best ways to think about Goth is that it is an aesthetic preference which finds beauty in unconventional things. Wanna know more? Check out her etiquette and advice blog site, Gothic Charm School. Not only that, but Jillian is writing a book coming out next year on the Goth movement! (Good gig for an editor, eh? It should be well written.) It takes all types, and Microsoft proudly accepts them all. Enjoy!

This Week on C9: Jeff Sandquist and Bill Gates stories

Dan — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 18:23:00 GMT

On a very special This Week on Channel 9, Jeff Sandquist joins Dan and Brian in studio to discuss

CNN's special Bill Gates slideshow narrated by Bill himself (0 - 2:00)
Newsweek's update of the infamous New Mexico Microsoft company photo 30 years later (2:00 - 3:30)
Jeff shares how Charles Torre got Chicken Pox after his BillG interview and retells the backstory of the first Bill Gates interview (3:30 - 6:10)
Clip from Charles interviews Bill Gates on his transition (6:10 - 8:00)
Clip from Bill Gates looking back video (8 - 9:24)
BillG's other achievement, redefining Cribs (9:24 - 12:45)
Jeff Sandquist recounts the backstory for when Channel 9 was there to break the news of Bill's transition and his history at Microsoft (12:45 - 20:15)
Clip from 'softies sharing their favorite BillG stories (20:15 - 23:15)
10 Tools I replaced with VSTS, 10 Tools I still use with VSTS by Mohammed Ashraful Alam (23:15 - 25:00)
CodeProject article: WPF version of PicLens by Sascha Barber and Marlon Grech (25:00 - 25:40)
CTP of Microsoft (Classic) ASP SQL Injection Analyzer via Greg Duncan (25:40 - 26:45)
Entity Framework: vote of no confidence and a response from Tim Mallalieu from the EF team (26:45 - 29:20)
Free eBook: Karl Seguin: Foundations of Programming, Building Better Software (29:20 - 30:20)
Derik Whittaker: Dimecasts.NET, 10 minutes or less on a developer topic via Rhonda Tipton (30:20 - 31:00)
Dan's Pick of the Week: If Programming Languages were Futurama characters via dzone (31:00 - 32:00)
Brian's Pick of the Week: 9-part series on VSTS Rosario by Willy-Peter Schaub (32:00 - end)

'Softies share their favorite Bill Gates stories

Dan — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 16:33:00 GMT

To remember Bill Gates's last day at Microsoft, we asked Larry Osterman, Bill Hill, Joan Hoshino, and Soma Somasegar to share their favorite Bill Gates stories.

Betsy Hjort: On Making Windows Server, Singing with Bill and Being Technical

Charles — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 19:12:16 GMT

Betsy Hjort, principal program manager, turns the camera on Jennifer & Charles (literally!) as she tells us about her role on the Windows Server team and reflects about her tenure at the company over the last 12 years. Way back in the day Betsy was a Pascal coder, but things started to change when she got hired at Microsoft. Betsy joined the Exchange team in 1996, and in this lively interview she shares stories including how Microsoft allowed astronauts out on mission in space to have private communications with their spouses for the first time (being able to say “I love you” privately to your wife is a great example of the power of technology changing people’s lives), and how she and Bill Gates sang “Islands in the Stream” to each other (well, not really, but you gotta hear the story – it’s a classic!). This is one of Jennifer’s favorite interviews; watch it all the way through to see Charles get schooled by Betsy! It’s worth the entire 37 minutes, we promise.

Low res file here.

Turner Broadcasting - Agile Architecture with Don Browning and Peter Provost

kirke — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 11:47:32 GMT

I was able to visit Turner Broadcasting in Atlanta to see an old friend, Don Browning, and we were lucky enough to bring along Peter Provost to talk about agile methodologies, processes, and tools.

This Week on Channel 9 @ Mix: March 14 Episode

Dan — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 16:51:29 GMT

In this week's episode, Brian, Dan, and Clint finish off our Mix spectacular with clips from:

- Clint interviewing Miguel De Icaza including what Karate Kid Part I can teach students (0:50)
- Chris Auld demonstrating an IIS module that dynamically combines resources (css, images, javascript, etc) resulting in 400% perf improvements, all with no code changes (2:57)
- John Sagiovanni showing of Zumobi, a free, extensible Windows Mobile app that connects your favorite services (6:57)
- Scott Hanselman and Clint Rutkas talking about Clint's segway skateboard and how Scott helped Clint redesign his other application for extensibility (12:33)
- 3rd Place Show Off Contest - Wii Data Visualizations and Multipoint by Veracity Solutions (19:18)
- 2nd Place Show Off Contest - Realtime Physics in Silverlight by Bill Reiss, Andy Beaulieu, and Jeff Weber (21:43)
- 1st Place Show Off Contest - Crayon Physics Deluxe by Kloonigames (24:47)
- Scott Hanselman does Jerry Seinfield and William Shatner/Captain Kirk imitations (27:45)

All About Mary Jo

Charles — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 17:10:41 GMT

Mary Jo Foley has spent two decades watching and reporting on everything Microsoft. We thought it would be fun to turn the tables on Mary and find out who she is and why she does what she does. We caught up with her at Lang.NET 2008. Special guest Don Box joins us for the first part of the interview. As always, he adds humor and energy to the conversation.

Enjoy.

This Week on Channel9 @ MIX: March 7 Episode

Dan — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 23:31:23 GMT

Watch a recap of the top news and events going on at Mix '08 from Dan, Brian, and our cameraman Clint Rutkas.

This week's show includes:

1. Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 highlights including Offline support for IE 8, and Activities
2. How NBC plans to revolutionize video using Silverlight for the Olympics
3. Richard Campbell, Carl Franklin and Steven Forte give their impressions on the Ray Ozzie/Scott Guthrie keynote
4. Our favorite moments Guy Kawasaki's interview with Steve Ballmer including Steve playing with Guy's Macbook Air and a shout-out to "WEB DEVELOPERS!"
5. Chris Auld showing off a prototype of an Open XML document viewer built in Silverlight
6. Tim Heuer and Jason Mauer show off their mobile crib as they start their Code Trip
7. Outtakes of RDs imitating each other including Scott Hanselman doing Billy Hollis, Billy Hollis doing an impression of Scott Hanselman, Carl Franklin doing Billy Hollis, Billy Hollis doing Billy Hollis, Carl Franklin doing Scott Hanselman and of course Scott Hanselman doing Scott Hanselman.

Tim Heuer and Jason Mauer: Code Trip Bus "Cribs"

Dan — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 18:29:43 GMT

Tim, Jason, and a few other folks are travelling all over the West coast meeting with customers, partners and of course, coding. Here you'll get a tour of their rolling crib and learn what The Code Trip is all about.

Bill Gates: Backstage at the Office Developer Conference

Dan — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 06:03:29 GMT

Ian and Coffeehouse thread (2:45 - 7:59)
2. Windows Server 2008 Launches, Tim Sneath including new kernel, and 3.0 SP1 red-bits (9:32 - 12:30)
4. Charles Torre's Lang.NET interview with LINQPad by Joseph Albahari (14:56 - 15:40)
6. Guitar Matey: Building a 3D XNA Game by Dan Waters (video)found via Coding4Fun (15:40 -16:35)
7. CodeProject: Windows Forms Wizard Control with Visual Studio Designer support by Manish Kumar, found via Jason Haley's blog (15:40 - 17:51)
8. Brian's Pick of the Week: MySpace adds WCF and Silverlight support for developers, via Michael Scherotter (17:51 - 19:02)
9. Dan's Pick of the Week: Screen-scraping function that converts HTML tables from a Web site into a DataSet, by Mark Smith (19:02 - 20:30)
10. Wrapup, Superbowl predictions from last week, college insults, and a clip on Low res download file for bandwidth challenged.

Brian Keller and Dan Fernandez: Name this Show!

Dan — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 16:17:41 GMT

This is Episode #1 of <insert.name.here>, a weekly recap show of our favorite things for developers including Channel9 videos, samples, bloggers, news, and much more.

This week we cover:

1. MSDN Code Gallery went Live (found on Greg Duncan's Cool Thing of the Day blog)
2. Jason Olsen's Pavel Bansky's Tetris on the .NET Micro Framework
4. C# Future Focus: Dynamic Lookup
5. Dan interviewing Shawn Burke's Tip on disabling optimiziations when debugging reference source code
7. Joel Spolsky on SQL Server 2008 Reset and Phil Factor on Microsoft doing their homework
8. Dan with Scott Guthrie on Windows, Web, and RIA and talking about how he built the <asp:calendar> control
10. Brian and Dan mock each other's hair and how he "poked" Dan's wife on Facebook.
11. Facebook releases JavaScript APIs using Nikhil Kothari's Script# Library
12. CodeProject: Eric Williams HTML Editor control article
13. Josh Holmes Code to Live Video: Create Your own Language Compiler, Lawrence Pit's OOK # .NET
15. Second Life replacing their scripting runtime for LSL with Mono and future .NET languages coming.
16. Brian's Pick of the week: Nic Fillingham's Custom Rockband Drum Kit at CES
17. Dan Pick of the week: Greg Dolley's port of Quake 3 from C to C++/CLI
18. It Came from the internets: What every Microsoft employee does on a conference call
19. Recap: email us at 2/8 Update: Episode 2 is http://visitmix.com/2008/) is going to be even larger than last year's, covering everything from Windows Presentation Foundation improvements to Web development frameworks including Dynamic Data and the MVC Framework, to dropping some hints about upcoming tooling support, and the major improvements in Silverlight 2.0.

You'll also hear Scott talk about the different needs of developers and designers with Expression, how he personally wrote the <asp:Calendar> control, the unique challenges in building controls and how XAML enables unmatched control composability.

Low Res Video Download

Scott Guthrie: What's Coming for Mix, Part 1: IIS7 for Developers

Dan — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 19:20:27 GMT

In this two-part interview, Scott Guthrie gives a preview of the technology that will be discussed at Mix (www.visitmix.com). In Part 1, Scott talks about IIS 7.0 for developers, how they've improved hosting scalability, improvements to configuration management and deployment with the recent release of Web Deployment project tools, and the improvements to production debugging and instrumentation.

Happy Holidays Niners

jeffsand — Sun, 23 Dec 2007 00:00:11 GMT

In keeping with what has become a holiday tradition here on Channel 9 he have Chris Anderson, Don Box and now Amanda Silver singing you a special holiday song.

You can compile along with them by grabbing the Very Beautiful holiday season! For even more holiday cheer, please check out episodes I, II,III and )
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MIX 2008: What the hell is this MIX thing, anyway?

Charles — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 23:07:16 GMT

Some of the brains behind MIX08 went for drinks and discussion with me to talk about what’s new, what’s hot and what’s not about the upcoming consumer web conference happening once again in Vegas at the Venetian hotel on March 5-7, 2008. Why is Steve Ballmer keynoting? What’s the scoop with Guy Kawasaki? Do we really care about designers or is it a developer world? Will Microsoft have anything new to say? What’s the scoop with Silverlight? What's the difference between MIX and PDC (and TechED for that matter)? Who should attend MIX? Why?

Be a fly on the wall and watch the conversation with the MIX team (forgive the lighting . . . it’s a little dark . . . we were in a real bar after all on a dark, rainy Seattle night). Then go and register at http://visitmix.com/2008 and take Thomas Lewis up on his offer for a free drink in Vegas!

Enjoy. Lot's of candid info about MIX in this one.

Brian Beckman: Don't fear the Monads

Charles — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 18:28:02 GMT

Functional programming is increasing in popularity these days given the inherent problems with shared mutable state that is rife in the imperative world. As we march on to a world of multi and many-core chipsets, software engineering must evolve to better equip software engineers with the tools to exploit the vast power of multiple core processors as it won't come for free as it did in the recent past which was predictably based on Moore's law.

Of course, learning new ways to think about programming semantics and code patterns are not always straight forward. For example, most imperative programmers (which include most of us who build software for a living...) are somewhat perplexed by the notion of functions as first class data structures that can be combined to create powerful and composable systems. Languages like Haskell are pure functional languages and require programmers to think in a different way, often in a precise mathematical fashion where composing and chaining functions is "the Way".

Dr. monads in an easy to understand way: a technical conversation at the whiteboard with yours truly for Channel 9.

This video interview is the result of Brian's idea that he can in fact remove the fear of monads from anybody who pays attention to his explanation. Of course, you can't just cover monads in a vacuum (category theory is not really addressed here) so the context is functional programming (Brian covers functions and composable functional structures (function chains) and of course monoids and then monads).

Tune in. There's a lot to learn here and only Brian can make monads easy to understand for the rest of us!

Happy Thanksgiving to all the US Niners out there.

Enjoy.

Sara Ford - "Katrina Survivor: This box is all that is left of this person’s or her families be

Charles — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 14:59:05 GMT

Sara Ford is a Visual Studio program manager in the Developer Division’s Customer Product Lifecycle group and her job is fascinating which she describes in the first part of this interview, but you must listen to her incredible story about Hurricane Katrina and her little hometown of Waveland, Mississippi. Katrina deeply impacted Sara’s family, friends and interestingly enough . . . her blog. How does technology factor into a natural disaster and how can it be used to help after a community is entirely wiped out? Sara has lots of idea. Watch and learn.

Hi res download file here.

Jack Gudenkauf - .Net 3.5 for ISVs

Sampy — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 19:07:51 GMT

Several weeks back James Vastbinder was able to coax Jack Gudenkauf into doing an interview on .NET 3.5 targeted at ISVs. Jack is an Architect on the Base Class Library team and tasked to work with Microsoft’s ISV Partners.

In this interview:

Jack talks about the BCL team and how they work within the larger Server and Tools business unit.
An inside view of the new Add-In Model in 3.5, (Its Jack's baby and he's rightly proud).
The Process ISV should mentally walk through when moving to managed code.
Tools and utilities used by the CLR team.

Technorati Tags: JackG, CLR, .NET3.5, BCL, Add-Ins, Jvast, Microsoft

So long, Adam Kinney...

Rory — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 21:26:00 GMT

Just as you need someone behind the scenes to articulate the motions of a Muppet^TM for the screen, you also need someone to sit behind a web site and get it to do stuff.

Adam Kinney was such a man (for the web thing - he has not, to my knowledge, except possibly at a few parties, ever been in control of a Muppet^TM).

Adam toiled away for years in the Channel 9 boiler room, knocking pipes with his cyberwrench and other tools, all of which begin with "cyber" to indicate that I'm not really talking about a boiler room. It's a metaphor.

And now he's going. Not very far since his new job leaves him in the same building, in the same office, and so only about ten feet from where I sit, but now it feels like there's a great distance between us.

This is Adam's farewell.

We talked about life as a Channel 9 geek, life in his new shoes, his attempt at conducting business inside Second Life, and more.

For serious, we're going to miss Adam around here. That's going to be cheapened a bit by him still roaming the halls and waving, but we can still pretend he's gone.

Goodbye, Adam Kinney.

I'll see you tomorrow.

Scott Guthrie: Enter Silverlight 1.0 (And it now runs on all Linux distros)

Charles — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 05:40:59 GMT

Silverlight 1.0 has left the building! For a lightweight (1MB) release, Silverlight delivers a lot: HD video, vector graphics and animation, running on browsers from Firefox to Safari and operating systems from Windows to Linux and its myriad of distros.

In this hot-off-the-presses interview, Scott Guthrie (General Manager of the team behind Silverlight and a host of other .NET technologies) gives Dr. Sneath the inside scoop on how he thinks about Silverlight and where it's heading in the next release.

Check out Scott's blog post for more information.

Tune in!