Two Great Blogs

Two of my favorite blogs rarely touch deeply technical topics, but are written by heads of very successful software companies:

Eric Sink: http://software.ericsink.com

Greg Brill: http://www.infusionblogs.com/blogs/gbrill

If you're ever interested in learning about the non-technical aspects of small software companies, check them out.

6/20/2005 4:09:14 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  

Blogger Leadership From Robert Scoble

I never really took the time to understand the MSN China censorship issue, but Robert took an unpopular stance and ended up changing his mind: http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/2005/06/18.html#a10422. I often disagree with some of his more controversial opinions (the ones I understand, at least) but it's good to see Robert practicing what he preaches regarding taking community feedback to heart.

6/19/2005 1:12:25 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  

Sara Williams Has Left The Building

A lot of people have commented about how sad they are that Sara Williams has left Microsoft. I certainly agree. She was a huge asset to the company and the person I was most often pointed to by my management as a role model of how to succeed at the company.

More specifically, I respect Sara because she is the antithesis of one of the things I hate: irresponsible people who passive aggressively complain in public about things they don’t like instead of doing the hard work to actually make changes happen.

Sara’s legacy is the new face of Microsoft’s community effort. It’s always been very easy for someone to fire off a whinemail about how Microsoft wasn’t transparent enough to customers. It wasn’t easy, however, to actually take the initiative to build and maintain the infrastructure that enabled GotDotNet or blogs.msdn.com. But that’s just what Sara did. Changing Microsoft isn’t hard—it’s practically impossible.

She didn’t have to write an “I’m so much smarter than [insert group here]—why don’t they respect me?” blog posting. She didn’t have to write an open letter to Steve Ballmer complaining about how [insert group here] wasn’t doing their job. She merely did what had to be done to make the company better.

Sara, I wish you the best of luck!

6/17/2005 4:06:47 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  

Splitting Properties Between Header And Implementation Files In C++/CLI

I've been working on a managed C++ application that uses the C++/CLI (Whidbey/2005/etc) syntax. While many of the new syntax changes have been really useful, I found that there is practically no documentation on how to split properties between header (.h) and implementation (.cpp) files. I figured I'd post this for any folks who come across the same issue.

Let's say you have this .h file:

ref class MyClass
{
public:
    property int MyProperty;
};

By default, the C++ compiler will automatically back MyProperty with a hidden int (or whatever you're using). This means that you don't need to give it any implementation code in your .cpp. In fact, if you try to, it'll throw an error that you've already defined its get/set since this is implicitly done. If you want to define your own implementation for the get/set, you'll need to change it to look like this:

ref class MyClass
{
public:
    property int MyProperty
    {
        int get();
        void set(int value);
    }
};

At the same time, you're now on the hook for fulfilling these methods yourself, so your .cpp file will need to look something like this:

int MyClass::MyProperty::get()
{
    // Do what you need to return the property value
}

void MyClass::MyProperty::set(int value)
{
    // Do what you need to set the property value
}

Note that you don't need to specify any special keywords or format as get_ or set_ and you can use any valid name for the set() parameter ("value" isn't required). If you want to make your property read-only, then you need to explicitly provide a get() but not a set(). If you want to make your property write-only, put the keyboard down and take three steps backwards

6/16/2005 9:38:49 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [6]  

At Least HR People Should Be Good At Updating Their Own Resumes

I recently came across http://blogs.msdn.com/jobsblog/archive/2005/06/01/423909.aspx, a blog posting in which a Microsoft human resources employee expresses their frustration over having to work with arrogant hiring managers. This posting has generated a ton of feedback, most of which has been surprisingly positive. Details of the hiring process is best described at http://saunderslog.com/?page_id=312.

I understand both sides of the argument. Defending HR, I know that it can be very hard to attract candidates that reach the bar set by MS managers. At the same time, I’ve had more bad experiences with people at MS HR than good ones so I can empathize with the hiring managers, probably due to the fact that good HR people handle your issue in one shot whereas bad ones require a lot of pushing and many iterations. Regardless, I don’t have a useful opinion on which side is more correct or how to fix the outstanding issues.

I can say—and I think a silent majority would agree—that the way this HR person handled this situation was pretty awful. Rather than driving change from within the company, the decision was made to do as much damage to the company’s image and the individual’s reputation as possible (I was tempted to use the term “suicide bomb” here). Having seen a few people do this sort of thing before, it doesn’t surprise me. What does surprise me, however, is the number of people hailing this person as a hero.

How could this action be considered courageous? How could it be heroic? To me, courageous and/or heroic would be driving change in Microsoft internal policy by directly confronting the issues and people involved. Airing dirty laundry in order to embarrass the change by someone with more courage (or fear of execs destroying them over this) is a lot harder and more impressive. And no, I don’t believe this person made a reasonable effort to fix this through rational means or else it would have been mentioned in the posting.

In particular, I think that the tone and language of the posting is almost laughable. While the responsibilities are quite different, I expect HR reps to have the same composure and people skills as product managers (possibly more, considering their actual business function). This section is probably where the most damage occurs:

“Quite honestly (maybe here is where my tirade kicks in), I’m sick and tired of the Hiring Managers around here not trusting their recruiters.  Hi there – news flash.  Guess what?  I probably have a higher IQ than you (yes, I just went there), and I “get” it.  Trust me.  They pay me the big bucks to be an expert on hiring for the company.  You do your job; I’ll do mine.  Plus, you don’t see me getting in your business every time some Microsoft program crashes on me, do you?”

To be very clear, I wouldn’t fire someone for having an opinion like this or expressing it--although it would piss me off if they had this problem and went public instead of coming to me. However, there is a good chance I would fire them for the lack of respect they clearly have for their coworkers. It’s hard to let one overly arrogant person get away with publicly embarrassing every senior manager in the company.

If you’re Microsoft, however, you can’t really do much. If you fire this person, or any of the other people who do the same kind of blogging, you’ll be unable to avoid the stigma of censorship. Heck, look at how much flak the company is taking over MSN Spaces in China. Just imagine the “Microsoft Fires Heroic Blogger In Act Of Unmitigated Censorship” headlines.

So how should Microsoft handle this situation? It’s practically impossible to fire people there, unless they break the law or commit a significant HR violation that really upsets someone. That leaves very few options, but I’d love to hear if anyone has anything clever (and legal). Assume you've already had their manager send a supporting email to keep them from doing anything rash before you've decided their fate, what would you do?

6/12/2005 10:45:58 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  

"Build Comment Web Pages" Is Broken With XPSP2
Check out http://blogs.msdn.com/vseditor/archive/2004/07/16/185788.aspx for a workaround.
6/12/2005 9:57:47 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  

Be Careful With Those Frequent Flyer Numbers!

When I rented a car from National via Expedia last week, I saw a spot to enter my Frequent Flyer number, so I did--it's kind of a reflex these days. When I arrived to pick up my car today, I learned that there is a $1.50/day "Frequent Flyer Number Charge" required for me to "earn" miles (Alaska Airlines in this case). The clerk informed me that I could prevent this charge in the future by not entering my number when asked. I might have been insulted if I wasn't so annoyed

6/10/2005 7:20:32 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  

What's The Deal With igfxext.exe Anyway?

Every time I try to watch a .dvr-ms (Media Center records in this format) or DVD the igfxext.exe process floors my CPU and nothing happens. Once I kill it in Task Manager everything resumes as suspected with no apparent downside. If you're having the same problem, try this workaround out.

6/6/2005 1:09:32 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  

Upgrading To The Redmond Public Services Universal Subscription

My wife and I recently went to China for a week. While we were gone, the burglar alarm was triggered in our home. We have a security monitoring company, who called the home, then my wife, then my cell. Since we were in the air at the time, we didn't answer. Their next escalation point was the Redmond Police, who informed them that they refused to check out the home since we hadn't paid the annual $10 "home with a burglar alarm" fee. I was a little annoyed at this--partly because of the fee (which we weren't aware of at all), partly because the alarm company didn't disclose this info nugget at the time of our contract signing. The Redmond Police were nice enough to send us the form in the mail after rejecting our monitoring company's plea for help. Unfortunately, they didn't mail it to April, 2005, so there's not much we can do besides pay it and hope there is no more red tape for next time.

Most of the people I've told about this have said things like "you have to pay the police extra money to do their job!?!" The reality is that we didn't know about it, but that doesn't absolve us. But what really annoys me is that they could have served and protected in a much more effective way if they had checked out the house this time and sent us the form afterwards. If we didn't pay the fee, then they could refuse next time. I wish there was a way to ensure we were covered in all the ways we take for granted (hence the need for a RPS Universal subscription). Now we need to contact the fire department to make sure they would check out a fire alarm, etc. 

We happened to be lucky and weren't missing anything--if someone had tried to break in, they were probably scared off by the alarm. If you're in a similar situation, you might want to make sure you're covered.

6/2/2005 9:18:47 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [3]