At Microsoft, there’s this passive-aggressive cultural thing called a “forcing function,” which, to put it crudely, is an engineering way for us to control the behavior of others. The idea is that you set up something to happen, like a meeting or an event, that will “force” a person or group to do something that you want them to do.

For example, if someone won’t answer your email, you can set up a meeting on their calendar. Since Microsoft is a meeting-oriented culture (even though we all hate them), a ’softie will be very reticent to decline your meeting request. So, they have a choice — they can attend your meeting so that they can answer your question in person or they can answer your email and get that time back in their lives. This kind of forcing function can take larger forms as well. I can’t say that our execs make the decision like this (since they don’t talk to me : ), but it is the case that signing up a large number of Microsoft employees to host and speak at important industry events does have the effect of making us get together to ensure that our technologies and our descriptions of those technologies holds together (well, holds together better than they would otherwise : ).

There are lots of great data talks at PDC 2010, all of which are available for online viewing:

• Code First Development with Entity Framework
  Jeff Derstadt, Tim Laverty
  Thursday, 2:00 PM-3:00 PM (GMT-7)
  
• Creating Custom OData Services: Inside Some of The Top OData Services
  Pablo Castro
  Thursday, 3:15 PM-4:15 PM (GMT-7)
  
• Enabling New Scenarios and Applications with Data in the Cloud
  Dave Campbell
  Thursday, 4:30 PM-5:30 PM (GMT-7)
  
• Building Scale-Out Database Solutions on SQL Azure
  Lev Novik
  Friday, 2:00 PM-3:00 PM (GMT-7)
  
• Building Offline Applications using the Sync Framework and SQL Azure
  Nina Hu
  On Demand
  

One day when I was supposed to be writing, I needed something to do (as often happens). In this particular case, I built a little tray icon app using the new (at the time) tray icon support in Windows Forms (this was a while ago : ). The data I was checking was my gmail account and whenever there was new mail, I’d pop up a notification. All very simple, so to be funny, instead of saying “You’ve got mail,“� my program said “I’s time to check the donuts.”

I’ve been working at home off and (mostly) on for 16 years…

My mobile device is driving me crazy.

I have an iPhone 4.0. Normally when it’s driving me crazy, it’s standard stuff like the battery life sucks or that the iOS 4.0.1 update didn’t fix the proximity detection or stop emails I send via Exchange from just disappearing into the ether.

David Ramel from 1105media.com is writing an article that includes the Microsoft interviewing process and he send me some questions:

[David] How would you succinctly sum up the Microsoft interview process as compared to those of other tech companies?

Often when I’m building my MVC 2 application using Visual Studio 2010, I get the following error:

The new sellsbrothers.com implementation has been a while in the making. In fact, I’ve had the final art in my hands since August of 2005. I’ve tried several times to sit down and rebuild my 15-year-old sellsbrothers.com completely from scratch using the latest tools. This time, I had a book contract (“Programming Data,” Addison-Wesley, 2010) and I needed some real-world experience with Entity Framework 4.0 and OData, so I fired up Visual Studio 2010 a coupla months ago and went to town.