Lorin

• Jacqueline Russell and Dan Fernandez: The Beginner Developer Learning Center Begins

  Mar 06, 2007 at 11:07 PM

  There is a video that introduces native C++:
  
  http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/visualc/features/
  

• Microsoft Research TechFest - Intro, DynaVis, and FastDash

  Mar 06, 2007 at 10:48 PM

  Pretty kewl stuff.

  BTW, you should deinterlace your video as a first step before doing any resizing or compressing.  Will make the text shots turn out clearer, and also any vertical motion will be more natural.

  Wish TechFest could still be going on next week since I'll be on campus.  Oh well.  But seeing these videos is the next best thing!  Looking forward to the next one in the series.

• Anthony Tsim chats about the MSDN Virtual Labs

  Jun 12, 2006 at 5:15 AM

  Would be *so* outstanding if this were also available through VNC.  Let all the cool Linux devs out there take a quick peek at VS!

• Jay Schmelzer - Working on the VB Core Team

  Nov 01, 2005 at 11:33 AM

  Wow, lots of great tips!  And not just stuff for VB-ers, there's some nuggets about the new devenv.exe that are equally applicable for C# and C++ folk, too.
  
  BTW, the interviews with code are always the best.
  
  -Lorin
  

• Mat Noguchi - Developer on Halo team gives tour of Bungie

  Oct 28, 2005 at 12:02 AM

  Naikrovek wrote:

  I saw an HDTV camcorder at BestBuy about a week ago ... it was a sony, it was small, handheld, and did wonderfully in low light.

  Sounds like the HC1.  I've got one, and I don't find it to be all that good in low light.  But then I've been spoiled with having a good 3-chip SD camera for the last three years.  (HD with 3X more pixels means right off the bat 3X less sensitivity for the same size sensor.)  The limitations in sensitivity means auto-focus doens't work as well indoors.
  
  Outdoors is a different story, and the HC1 does do an admirable job.  Great color.  So altogether it's very nice to see usable HD cameras enter the consumer market.  The 60-year reign of NTSC and PAL is finally drawing to a close.

• Mat Noguchi - Developer on Halo team gives tour of Bungie

  Oct 27, 2005 at 3:57 PM

  DevilsRejection wrote:

  you mentioned that you have a new hd camcorder, which one?

  Whatever it is, it looks like it's a shoulder-mount.  Maybe an FX1 or even the new Canon XL H1!  (I would be very envious...)  Or maybe it's just a smaller cam on a shoulder-mounted steadicam.  But it looks good in low light, so I'm thinking it's at least an FX1.

• Mark Boulter and Brian Pepin - Sneak peak at Cider (visual designer for Orcas, future version of Vis

  Oct 25, 2005 at 3:25 AM

  Very cool video.  And Scoble -- thanks for using a tripod during the opening interview part.  Did you get one with a fluid head?  It's nice and smooth!
  
  My favorite features:
   
  I'm familiar with today's Toolbox, so it's outstanding that Cider uses exactly the same drag and drop approach to get a general layout going.  I sat down to the Sparkle lab at PDC, and found it to be way different from what I'm used to, so very glad to see that creating XAML will be "business as usual" when Orcas ships.
  
  Both Cider and Sparkle can hand changes to each other, not breaking anything that the other one has done.
  
  Design time can be made to listen to the control's events and tweak property values in your source code on-the-fly.  Didn't know that was possible in Whidbey until now, so I'll have to update some of my WinForms controls to take advantage of that.
  
  
  By the way, you guys are getting lots of mileage out of source code layout preservation!
  
  -Lorin
  

• Andy Edmonds and Erik Selberg - Frank talk about MSN Search

  Oct 22, 2005 at 12:12 AM

  Hmmm, "offshoring" brings up Scoble's site as #5, even though he says "I'm no expert in offshoring."  In that respect, I hope this "neural net" thing, although intentionally obscure in its description during the video, is able to parse the language of the page itself similar to how a human would, and understand to a degree what concepts are being presented from the site.  Then rank links accordingly.  It's one thing to do as Google does and simply rank search terms higher based on how many people reference them.  That's easy, just counting references.  And then you're suceptible to people exploiting it, as with the "miserable failure" bug.  But to actually parse the thought on the page, that's hard, and that's where it will become amazing.  Just as these guys are saying, that will weed out the splogs, and offer much better specificity.
  
  Another powerful thing with a true AI type of neural net: when it sees the title "random thoughts", it should toss that out as a "noise concept" (for lack of a better term), and look deeper into the page for more of the meat.
  
  I'll close with a little bug report, an easy thing to fix: with IE6 when you bring up the Settings screen, then show the Search Builder DIV, you've got the bug with an underlying SELECT (named setlang in this case) showing up over the popup DIV:
  
  
  
  
  I had this problem on one of my pages a couple years ago.  In the file common.js if you put this in the function toggleQB(), it should take care of the issue:
  
    sl=document.getElementById('setlang');
    if(sl)sl.style.visibility=show?'hidden':'visible';
  
  Best of luck with this groovy AI project, guys!
  
  -Lorin Thwaits
  

• Bar Code Blitz

  Oct 06, 2005 at 9:44 PM

  When we made this video for the PDC ShowOff event we were limited to 5 minutes total.  We had actually taken lots more footage during the original filming.  So I have now put together a longer version that includes all the content and greater bandwidth so you can actually read what the code says as it flies by.  You can download it from this link:
  
  winfxRocks.com
  
  
  
  For those interested in the source code, it's available for download in a .ZIP from that site.  It will do both 3 of 9 and also 2 of 5 codes.
  
  -Lorin
  

• PDC Walkabout (Three clips)

  Sep 24, 2005 at 8:40 PM

  PJTewkesbury wrote:

  (Will) Microsoft make the PDS Sessions available as webcasts/videos etc like they did with PDC03?

  Yup, at the very least every attendee will get a copy when it's available, and those who didn't go can pay a few hundred and get the set.  Haven't heard if they'll put up a site for 6 months with the content online like last time.  I hope that happens...
  
  -Lorin
  

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