If I’m doing the calculations correctly, Ryan Dawson is not yet old enough to drink, but he still manages to give the best, most direct, most thorough feedback of anyone in the WinFX/Longhorn developer community (Ian Griffiths is a close second, but he’s got that English polite thing going for him, so it’s hard to know just how much he’s really complaining : ). Ryan’s built apps to test the various pillars and makes his complaints very clear, as in this post about Avalon 3D.

That’s not to say that I agree with everything he says or that the product team agrees, but I wish I had 100 more Ryan Dawson’s banging on the pillars and complaining loudly and clearly so that the product teams can get some crystal clear feedback on what works, what doesn’t and what developers want. If you don’t have a blog, get one or post your complaints on the newsgroups. Come on! Tell us why we suck and what to do to stop sucking! You know you want to. : )

I can’t get Sam to reply to my emails, so I’m hoping he’ll see this post: Sam, can I get the status of your DevCon slides? They were due Monday. Thank you.

I’ve recently added another castle to my empire by taking on the Content Strategist duties for the MSDN Smart Client Developer Center.

When I step into a new project, my typical mode of operations is to gather goals and issues from as many people as care that I can find, stir it all up with what I think is important, run it up the flag pole, repair the bullet holes a few times and then execute. I’m in the “gather” mode on the SCDC right now and I’m curious what your goals and issues are for the SCDC as it stands today and for what you’d hope it to become tomorrow. Feel free to respond to this post (even anonymously if it makes you feel more comfortable) or email me. The idea is that the SCDC becomes a valuable place for Microsoft developers building Smart Clients of all kinds, but particularly using Windows Forms, the Compact Framework, Visual Studio Tools for Office (did you know that they have a ClickOnce equivalent?) and WinFX.

BTW, I’m still the Content Strategist for the Longhorn DevCenter, so don’t go getting your hopes up that I’ll stop beating that particular drum. : )

Here. If you haven’t made your hotel reservation for the Applied XML Developer’s Conference, Oct. 20-21 at the Skamania Lodge in Stevenson, Washington (40 minutes from Portland Int’l airport), you’ll want to do that today as the rooms we’ve been holding are about to be released to the general public. Also, if you haven’t registered for the conference, you’ll want to register now, as we’ve only got a few seats left.

I saw this in an email from John Mason in PSS today:

“Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place.  Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.”
–Brian Kernighan

Charlie Kindel has been an idol of mine since the COM days. As an MS employee, he set the standard of openness towards externals long before it was in vogue. Recently, he’s been posting on a topic near and dear to my heart: in home servers and storage.

Right now, I’ve got two: a file server and a media server (or, what I hope to become a media server when Media Center Extender boxes are available). Alone these lines, two recent posts are of particular interest:

• mini-ITX Windows Server 2003 Home Server
• Storage at Home - How to store that precious data - Part 1

While my backup system works, it’s not nearly as robust as I would like it to be and due to size constraints, I don’t even back up my audio or video media (although I do back up the images), so I’m very much looking forward to Charlie’s further writings on this topic.

Subscribed.

P.S. While I don’t believe that this attitude has anything to do with Charlie Kindel, if there had been a 3rd Sells Brother, he would’ve been named Charlie. Likewise, I’ve always hated my girlie name and sometimes think about changing it. To what, you ask? You guessed it: Charlie. : )

For the last few months, I’ve been doing some really cool work with a group of folks whose only task is to build apps that exercise the WinFX technologies so that we can make sure stuff works the way we want it to and give feedback to the product teams when it doesn’t. Because we’re still in preview technology land, various features that we want to test are in various builds of each part of WinFX, so we’re constantly fooling around with new combinations of the bits, which we bring together in VPC HD images and that I then have to download. Since I’m downloading the 7+ GB images from my house over VNC and since the internal VNC connection software isn’t quite as robust as the VNC software we ship to the rest of the world, that means that I’m constantly being kicked off of my connection and reconnecting, sometimes 2 or 3 dozen times over the 2 days it takes me to download the image. I just finished downloading another build today.

Unfortunately, when setting the Administrator password, I managed to enter the wrong thing twice, which meant that I had no way to log into my new VPC image after 2 days of hard labor getting it to my house. So, instead of re-downloading it again, I googled for a utility to reset the Administrator password. The first link was a knowledge base article from MS that didn’t help me because I hadn’t yet logged in to make myself a password reset diskette (which, frankly, I never do anyway). The second link was a list of completely unsupported, possibly illegal, tools to reset the Administrator password. The first one on that list worked like a charm in several orders of magnitude less time than downloading a new VPC image.

So, now I have mixed feelings. On the one hand, I’m happy that I didn’t have to go through all that trouble again, but on the other, I doesn’t seem very useful to set my Administrator password to anything useful if I anyone with physical access can just reset it so easily. Of course, Keith Brown and other security experts have been saying that physical security is paramount for any other kind of security to be affective, but it was kind of unsettling to have the point driven home so starkly.

Well, to be fair, Don leaves some details out, but he wanted to see if he could explain Indigo in 5 minutes or less. Worth the read.