dnjake

• A Peek Behind C9 Revolution UX

  Aug 01, 2009 at 12:56 PM

  Like almost all recent videos, this one does not work.  It is continually disrupted by the need to buffer more data.  Channel 9 has always been poor functionally because it was very difficult to find anything old.  But the video used to work fine.  No more.  As far as I am concerned Channel 9 has become an embarssment to Microsoft and everyone associated with it.  Note that the 10-4 episdode 29 Workflow Web Services Video is the one recent one that I have tried which worked without problems.

• Scott Guthrie: Silverlight 3 is here!

  Jul 10, 2009 at 6:29 PM

  Well perhaps you should get excited about the decline of channel 9.  I don't know if it is actually using Silverlight.  But I thought Silverlight's great virtue was being able to adjust banwidth usage to what was available on a connection.  In contrast channel 9 has stopped working over a 700kbps DSL connection unless I go to the trouble of downloading the video.

• This Week C9: Revolution 9 - The Future of Channel 9

  Jun 27, 2009 at 11:00 AM

  This video is another instance of a common recent problem on channel 9.  That is a video that is not usable over 700kbps DSL.  Generally, the quality of channel 9 usability is erratic at best.  Increasingly, I am finding it not worth making the effort to use it.  Certainly it has become a poor advertisement for Microsoft quality.

• WPF 4 Beta 1 Designer – Looking Forward

  Jun 13, 2009 at 7:00 AM

  A mess has been made of posting this video.  Anyone who wants to put the best foot forward for WPF and VS2010 should start out by finding someone who can post a usable video.  This presentation is an embarassment.

• Luca Bolognese: C# and VB.NET Co-Evolution - The Twain Shall Meet

  May 14, 2009 at 7:31 AM

  The reality is that there probably would not be both VB and VC# except that VB was so widely used in the Microsoft installed base and C was the industry standard language.  But both languages have more than enough paying customers to justify continuing work to maintain and enhance them.  In the near term, the enhancements are likely to be mostly of interest to language enthusiasts.  But there is no particular reason why an enhancement is more appropriate for one language or the other.  When a customer actually decides they do want to use one of these enhancements, they should not discover that they need to bring a new language into their environment to use it.  They are paying enough to support Microsoft doing the work of getting those enhancements in both languages.

• Inside IE 8 RC1 with Dean Hachamovitch and Jason Upton

  Jan 27, 2009 at 7:23 PM

  The configuration dialog is a real downer.  Trying to force people to use the settings Microsoft wants is a disgrace.  If I see the dialog again I may think about switching to Mozilla and I am a fairly hard core Microsoft supporter.

• 10-4 Episode 1: Working with the Visual Studio 2010 CTP VPC

  Dec 17, 2008 at 5:53 PM

  As best I can tell, it is still the case that VPC does not work on Windows Vista Home Premium.  That point should be called out any time that instructions are given that depend on VPC.  The other reality about this CTP is that very little of the .net4 technology is in it yet.  If you are interested in TFS or specifically in Visual Studio, it may be worth the effort.  But I would not have bothered with the large effort of downloading it if I had realized how little was in it.

• This Week on C9 – Hell No! Countdown to PDC2008 Ambush Dan and Brian, Taking Over their Show for 10 Groovy Minutes

  Oct 10, 2008 at 1:28 PM

  I am happy to hear confirmation that you plan to put the sessions online.  It was actually done for the last PDC.  But only a few weeks after the fact apparently through some kind of special effort by someone in Microsoft.  I found those presentations very useful and I am looking forward to the ones from this PDC.

• Windows Vista - 64 bit in the Mainstream

  Aug 14, 2008 at 12:55 PM

  Adobe Photoshop is one of the few commonly used client applications that actually has some prospect to add real value with the extra memory that 64 bit clients make possible.  The fact that they are just getting around to 64 bit support should tell you something about how little real value most customers can expect from all that extra memory.  Of course, once all the compatibility issues for 64 bit have  been dealt with, there will be no reason not to use 64 bit.  But only users of very selected applications are going to see any real value from it.
  
  As Charles points out, many core does not come for free.  Few companies are going to invest in parallel processing unless they are going to be able to show their customers some real value from it.  People who think advances are adopted just because technophiles think they are great should take a look at the history of IPV6.  Today, many core also does not come for free from a power perspective.  People who expect users to burn that power just to make some lights flash faster should take a look at the history of the Pentium 4.

• Vince Orgovan: Windows Vista Telemetry

  Aug 11, 2008 at 2:23 PM

  The reason for a single UI thread is very simple.  The use of a single thread results in no problem in synchronizing any of the message processing involved in presenting the UI.  It is far from obvious that there is any problem with this situation as long as an application does not try to do some significant synchronous background processing on the UI thread.  It is also the case that .net provides functionality that makes the use of a background thread easy for background processing in either a WinForms or a WPF environment.  In practice with WPF it is easy to use three threads that could be running on three processors for the UI.  Those threads include the standard UI thread, the render thread, and a background worker thread.  Charles can rant on all he wants about the wonders of multicore.  But it may take him a while to find the client workload that actually has any real requirement for more than two or three cores.
  
  As far as Vista stability goes, it has been very good since I started using it during the RC0.  I have had two or three blue screens in total during that time.

See more comments…