Ray Ozzie kicked off the MIX keynote by talking about the fantastic new things that have happened at Microsoft in the past year that are really re-engineering the DNA at Microsft from the acquisition of Aquantitive to the fantastic internal work with Silverlight 2.0 and IE8. As an employee in the trenches, it's often hard to keep focus on that big picture and remember that the company is aggressively self critical and self correcting. Another great step we are trying to take, that Ray touched on a little bit, is acquiring Yahoo!. It's interesting, but even in the field, I've seen that just the fact that we've made an offer has had a profound effect on a lot of people and is driving us into new and interesting directions. After that, he talk about the big picture and the directions that Microsoft is going with Services and Advertising and how that fits into the big picture of our S+S message. By Services, he's talking about software services in the Cloud (internet/network) rather than consulting services.

The next huge point that he talked about is the idea of software above the level of a single device. Our users are starting to leverage intelligent devices of all types from phones to desktops to cars in every part of their lives. We need to look at how to really leverage the strengths of each of these devices and platforms.

There are 5 buckets that we can think about these services in the cloud.

1. Connected Devices
   • The vision here is that we will have applications and services that span
2. Connected Entertainment
   • The vision here is that we would only have to license our software and media once and be able to use that across all of our devices from our music player to our desktop or car. This is a great
3. Connected Productivity
   • The vision here is that we will have a seemless experience from the desktop to the mobile device to the web with Office Desktop, Office Mobile and Office Live (web based).
4. Connected Business
   • The start of the vision is a set of services from online CRM, financial services, hosted exchange, commutation services and even hosted SQL Server with an elastic type cloud supporting it. The long game is enabling utility computing in the enterprise where people will virtualize more and more of their infrastructure onsite and in the cloud.
5. Connected Development
   • We have a ton of different scenarios that we can code to with the same skill set of .NET and XAML across many different platform. That's exciting. 

Personally, I'm really excited to part of the company with an end to end vision that is as complete as the one that Ray was able to lay out today.

Wednesday, March 05, 2008 5:58:36 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [1] 

I woke up this morning to a very interesting email from Steve Ballmer conveying the fact that we had made a public bid to buy Yahoo! As I picked my jaw up off the floor, I noticed all of my standard news sources had it listed at their top story as well. This is cool because I had been working on a blog post about some of the REALLY cool things that Yahoo! has been doing.

Yahoo has released the beta of their long anticipated Yahoo Messenger for Windows Vista application. I've been looking forward to seeing this application in the wild since I heard about it. This was actually a partnership between the WPF team at Microsoft and Yahoo to get this out. There are a ton of cool features liked tabbed conversations, a Vista Gadget to track friends and much much more. It hasn't tried to be feature parity with the original Yahoo messenger, it's a being unto itself.

I've had the good fortune to know Eric Burke from Yahoo who happens to be the technical lead on the Vista Messenger project. It turns out he lives in Novi, MI and manages a team in Palo Alto, CA. Guess how they do the majority of their communication... :) I met Eric on the plane to MIX last year. I was wearing a Visual Studio jacket and he was reading MSDN Mag so we recognized each other as fellow geeks. We hung out quite a bit at the conference and have stayed in good contact in Michigan since then. Eric was the guy that, when he saw the Silverlight 1.1 (now 2.0) keynote, said "Hey cool - I'm a mac programmer!". At the conference, he was speaking about the challenges that they have faced with building one of the premier WPF applications and working with the design team from Frog Design.

Eric said that it was really rough in the early goings because nobody knew how this was supposed to go. Microsoft had a good story for designer/developer workflow but nobody had actually done it yet. The first couple of times they really couldn't use what the designers had tossed over the wall or it required such drastic changes to their code that it was painful. As time went on, they figured out how to get along better and better so by the time that MIX rolled along, they were able to integrate changes often in as little as 3-5 minutes first thing in the morning. I've also had Eric come out to a couple of different events to speak about real world experiences working with WPF. One of the things that challenging right now is that there are not fantastic tools for looking at the XAML and seeing what the redundant layouts are or where the memory leaks are.

Since it's gone public, it's been interesting listening to people's reactions to it. One of the common ones is a complaint that it doesn't support all of the features of the mainstream Yahoo! messenger application and it's add-in model. I actually like that about it. It's refreshing to see a company take a line in the sand and not be 100% backwards compatible and feature complete with the legacy applications. This is something that Microsoft never seems to be able to do. There was a fantastic ad that showed VS.NET 2005 and it said "with 400 new features, the difference is clear" and right next to that add was an ad for Sugar CRM that said "Back with fewer features than ever, the difference is clear". And it's true, the IM clients that have been around forever are full of features that nobody uses or are used by a small enough percentage of the audience that they are more of a maintenance burden than useful features. Now, it takes a lot of moxy to say that "I'm willing to forgo some of the legacy customers upgrading to do the right thing for the future and the application." I hope that Yahoo! sticks to it's guns on not trying to make the Vista client feature parity with the old client as they go forward. Obviously there are things that they will need to add, like VOIP and some type of add-in model, but what form that takes is going to be interesting to see.

I don't know if the deal is going to go through but I hope that it does just to get this type of edgy and exciting decision making into Microsoft. I know that Steve Ballmer and crew are looking at the advertising, search and social networking properties as well all of which are substantial. I was looking at my traffic searches on my blog and Yahoo! searches accounted for a really solid portion of my traffic. Obviously it wasn't equal to Google but it was still substantial. We've offered them $44.6 Billion which is a decent premium on their stock price. According to the NY Times, Yahoo! turned down earlier merger offers so I'm also really hoping that this doesn't turn into an ugly hostile style takeover.

Yahoo! Messenger for Windows Vista™

Microsoft Makes .6 Billion for Yahoo - Mergers, Acquisitions, Venture Capital, Hedge Funds -- DealBook - New York Times

Microsoft makes unsolicited $44.6 billion bid for Yahoo - Feb. 1, 2008

Friday, February 01, 2008 12:37:45 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [12] 

I blogged last about Platforms verses Applications and put the statement out there that platforms beat applications every time. At least one of my readers (Alan Stevens) agrees with me. My other reader hasn't commented yet.

Alan pointed out, however, that I missed some rather important platforms that Microsoft ships. One that all of the developers in the audience (on the Microsoft technology stack so that doesn't include you Joe) probably use on a daily basis is Visual Studio. Alan posted about it in his post on VSX. He points out Visual Studio itself is just a shell and that all of the other bits that you see are simply add-ins. That shell is now available for you to leverage as you see fit in your applications. Obviously, you can write add-ins such as the Dotfuscator from Preemptive Solutions or CodeRush. What you probably didn't know is that you can build a stand alone application there that you ship independently of anything else. The cool part about that is that you have a built in extensibility model and other applications can meld with yours because you're on top of a great platform. :) Don Demsak, aka DonXML, had a podcast about Visual Studio Extensibility back in April.

Mappoint and Virtual Earth, despite my recent jolly adventure with Mappoint, is a fantastic platform for building applications on top of. One of the local companies here in Michigan is using it for the base for one of their applications called eoStar. I find it fun that they have built their application as an extensible platform as well - see their plug-ins section for things that third parties have built for their applications.

The Microsoft Dynamics CRM is a horizontal base platform for you to build vertical applications on top of such as Omnivue's Health Care application. There are multiple ways to integrate here from API calls to interfaces you can implement to web services that you can leverage.

I know that I'm missing some of the important applications out there that Microsoft ships as a platform.

So, what does this mean for your applications? There are two directions that you should be looking.

First, when you are starting a new application - is there something out there that you can leverage as the base for your application that will handle a lot of the underlying plumbing. I like Brian Prince's quote - "Don't be a plumber." What he's talking about is leveraging platforms and frameworks that will do a lot of the heavy lifting for you so that you can concentrate on your business logic which is your real value add.

Second, you need to be thinking about what are the possible extensibility points where someone else could tap into your application. I know, you're thinking - but Josh, I'm building the corporate equivalent to Notepad here - there is no extensibility points. While that may be true - think about your favorite text editor here and what add-ins you're using. If you are still using Notepad - you are in the dark ages and need to look at UltraEdit, Scite, E or any of the thousands of others that are out there. One of the things that all of these have in common is that they all support extensibility. Scite, for example, has a great page dedicated to different plug-ins called Scite Extras. There are extras there from various language formatting libraries to scripts that you can use. But what this proves is that even simple tasks like text editing can benefit greatly from being able to leverage a great platform so you should be thinking about that with your applications.

Alan Stevens on VSX

Monday, November 05, 2007 2:51:20 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [83] 

Jeff Blankenburg already did a fantastic post on DevLink. John Kellar and his crew did a fantastic job pulling this conference together. In its second year - I was impressed with the whole event from the speaker’s dinner to the quality of speaker that this event was able to attract. There were 5 regional directors, 19 MVPs and some of the heavy hitters from Microsoft including Ron Jacobs and Brad Abrams. For some reason they let me speak too.
Have I mentioned that Brad Abrams is my new hero! I’m not belittling any of the other speakers because there were some amazing speakers and things that happened but I feel compelled to brag on Brad a little here.
I saw Brad at Boston Remix but I got to actually meet and spend some time with him at Devlink in Nashville, TN. This is a community conference, large for a community conference but a community conference none the less which is what makes this all the more special. First, someone on Brad’s level is actively engaging the community is very cool. For those of you who don’t know who he is, he was one of the original 5 on the CLR team. He has moved all the way up from writing the String class to his current position as the owner of the entire UI platform. That’s WPF, Silverlight and AJAX.  Between him and Scott Guthrie (his boss) – I can’t think of another company whose brass get out into the community the way these guys do.

Anyways, back to the story. Brad did the opening keynote where he did a fabulous job. He also did some other sessions with a lot fewer people in them. When he wasn’t talking, he was attending sessions like a normal attendee and between sessions and at lunches he was hanging out in the lobby and just talking to people. It was fun sitting in on a lot of those conversations as they ranged from Test Driven Development to the Dynamic Language Runtime to Kathleen Dollard and Billy Hollis taking him to task over complexity in the frameworks, timelines and more. At this point in the conference I’m really blown away by Brad and how approachable he is. He told me to call him and chat about some of the questions that I have around Silverlight road mapping. I know that he meant it and I’m going to take him up on it after we’ve both had a chance to recover from our travel this past couple of weeks.
Then I heard the about what he did on Saturday afternoon and was completely blown away. John Kellar, the main conference organizer, wrote me to tell me about it and I found Brad's post on it. Brad went to listen to a talk on AJAX but the speaker didn’t show. There were 30 people in the room that were, understandably, getting bent out of shape about it. So Brad steps up and asks – “Who wants to see me do some AJAX demos?” An hour fifteen later – the crowd was completely jazzed by the stuff Brad was showing off the cuff. That’s very cool of him and shows that he is truly invested in the community and still has the technical chops to backup any of his things he says.
It’s truly impressive and that’s why Brad Abrams is my new hero!

Friday, October 19, 2007 12:37:56 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [1] 

It's a very exciting day for Scott and for Microsoft as Scott Hanselman is joining Microsoft. He's going to be working for Scott Guthrie's organization. I'm excited to see what he does to re-attract the "Alpha Geeks" now. I'm sure that he's going to do fantastic things and have an international impact.

Scott Hanselman's Computer Zen - Blue Badge

Sunday, July 22, 2007 12:49:40 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [0] 

Jon Box is blogging now! Jon is a fellow Architect Evangelist. He's a former RD and a prolific author (at least before he joined Microsoft). He's a fellow mobile fanatic -  he's even written books on the topic.

It's great to see my co-workers start blogging. I've been encouraging Jon (and some of the others) to start blogging. They keep coming back with questions like "What do I have to say?" and "Where do you get inspiration?". For me it's not finding inspiration - it's finding time. I'm honest with them and tell that it's hard work and a lot of time to really keep a solid blog going and I don't do the best job. The real reason that I've been pressuring Jon (and some of the others) to start blogging is that I have a tremendous amount of respect for the team and want to hear their thoughts.

The time issue is a big one when it comes to blogging. I don't know how people like Scott Hanselman find the time do keep up with everything that they do. It's super human and he must not sleep.

In the mean time - let's welcome Jon to the neighborhood and show him a little blog love... (his term - not mine :D )

Link to Jon Box

Friday, May 11, 2007 1:45:04 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [0] 

The PDC 2007 will be October 2-5 with a couple of preconference days.  There's not a ton of detail, but the PDC is always the forward looking, we are about to release some things that are huge type of event.

You should definitely put this on your calendar.

Link to PDC announcement page

Thursday, December 14, 2006 1:54:03 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [1] 

Working at Microsoft so far is a trip! I’ve been warmly welcomed by a tremendous number of people that I have known for years as well as many that I have meet only virtually through conference calls and emails over the past 2 weeks. I’ve also heard from a ton of people throughout the US and the rest of the world sending their congratulations.
A lot of what I’ve been doing is training on all of the internal policies, infrastructure and learning all about this fantastic company that I’ve joined. It’s amazing how big this company is. 70,000+ employees and growing.
(In fact, they are actively looking for 3 more Architects for the Breadth team with Central Region DPE. If you are in the Central Region but not in the Heartland District (that’s mine) and you’re interested in applying for one of those 3 architect positions – feel free to email me and I’ll pass you’re contact information to the appropriate people.)
It’s starting to get exciting as I’m starting to get engaged with customer and partners. It’s very cool getting to promote and to work with some really exciting technologies with .NET 3.0 coming out next month. More to come on these technologies coming soon.

Wednesday, October 25, 2006 7:56:03 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [0] 

I wanted to publically apologize to Jennifer Marsman for not mentioning her in the announcement to my new job. She is the Depth Developer Evangelist for the Heartland District. She deals with a lot of bigger accounts in the Heartland District and is a ton smarter than me, Drew Robbins and a lot of us other Breadth Evangelists...

For proof that she's smarter - check out her patent:

http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PG01&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=%2220060074902%22.PGNR.&OS=DN/20060074902&RS=DN/20060074902

Wednesday, October 18, 2006 11:33:47 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [0] 

After several good years working with SRT Solutions and the good people there (Bill Wagner and Dianne Marsh as business partners and John Hopkins, Patrick Steele, Darrell Hawley, Alex Gheith and Martin Shoemaker as sub-contractors) I’ve gotten an opportunity that I can’t pass up.

I am joining Microsoft as an Architect Evangelist.

I am not going to be moving from my happy home in Manchester, MI. My office will be in Southfield, MI and I will be covering the Heartland District (Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee). While Darryl Hogan and Jon Box are Depth Architect Evangelists, I’ll be a Breadth Architect Evangelist. What that means is that they will be spending a lot of time with a few clients while my focus is much broader and community based. As the title suggests, my job will be to meet with and evangelize to architects throughout the district. A large part of my job will be to cultivate the architectural community the way that Drew Robbins (Developer Evangelist for the Heartland District) does for developers.

I’m really looking forward to working with many of you through my work at Microsoft.

Monday, October 02, 2006 9:43:23 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [2] 

Since Andrew Duthie fired off his rendition of "Love Shack", Drew Robbins had to come back with his Karaoke rendition of this MC Hammer Song.

MC Hammer he's not but I gotta say that he's learned a step or two since TechEd (The origional Dancing DE). Maybe I should start trying those dancing machines...

I'm not sure who that is singing in the background but they are not bad - not up to Duthie standards (remember that he's damn good) - but trust me there were worse performances at the Karaoke bar at the MVP party at the Science Fiction Museum.

Picture of the Dancing DEs: Andrew Duthie on the Left and Drew Robbins on the right.

So far the count is:

1 to Andrew Duthie for the singing
0.5 to Drew for attempting to Dance
1 to Drew for dancing the second time

Gotta Vote for who's the best - use the comments to vote for your favorite!

So it's Drew up by half a point. Any other contestants out there? Gotta great Dancing DE moment on video that you'd love to share with the world? Let me know and I'll make sure that it's posted!

	Drew Robbin's Encore Video Performance
	http://www.joshholmes.com/images/DancingDE2.wmv
	Drew Robbin's Blog

Monday, October 03, 2005 10:12:23 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [0] 

Drew Robbins was the first Dancing DE... Andrew Duthie has raised the bar with his rendition of Love Shack! I wish that I could have gotten the whole thing on video but I did the best that I could here. This was at the MVP Summit 2005. There was a party at the Science Fiction Museum with a kareoke bar upstairs.

Two extra fun bits:
1) That's his boss, Kim, with him. She's the manager for all of the DE's in the Eastern District of the US.
2) He's pretty good - in fact, he used to have a band before Microsoft took all of his spare time. Oh yeah and he had children so he didn't have time anyway...

Update: I've been corrected - he's damn good!

	Andrew's Video Performance
	http://www.joshholmes.com/images/DuthieLoveShack.wmv
	Andrew Duthie's Blog

Monday, October 03, 2005 9:02:15 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [0] 

Bill Steele, our Microsoft Developer Community Championin the "Heartland District", did something very cool. He's a private pilot and donates his time to Angel Flight and the Air Care Alliance.

He took off on his own time to fly 45 trips down to the hardest hit places to take down 17,500 MREs and other stuff. I think that's cool and that it should be commended.

Now, it costs a lot of money to do all of that flying. According to Bill's post, it's between $200-$400 per flight. That tells me that it was between $9,000 and $18,000 for Bill to deliver all of that food and supplies. Really, that's reasonable because about a dollar or less for each of those meals to be delivered. If that's all that you tipped the pizza guy - he'd be pissed. In the mean time, we need to help out by visiting the links below and donating.

	Bill Steele's post
	http://blogs.msdn.com/wsteele/archive/2005/09/08/462752.aspx
	Angel Flight
	Visit to learn more or donate
	http://www.angelflightamerica.org/
	Air Care Alliance
	Visit to learn more or donate
	http://aircareall.org/

Thursday, September 15, 2005 2:29:52 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [0]