EricTN

• Checking In: Larry Osterman - 26 Years of Programming at Microsoft and Counting

  Jan 08, 2012 at 8:49 PM

  People like Larry are the heart & soul of a great enterprise.

• Ping 125: Windows Phone Fangirls, Nokia Lumia sales, Kinect on PC, Xbox 360 update

  Dec 04, 2011 at 11:39 PM

  Laura, me see u done something different with your hair. This is good backhanded complement!

• Ping 124: Control Alt Compete, Salute to Vets, Halo Monument, Microsoft Translator

  Nov 21, 2011 at 9:01 PM

  Me also have crush on Laura!

• Fun with ASP.NET MVC 3 and MEF

  May 01, 2011 at 12:04 AM

  I loved this presentation.  MEF + MVC seemed fun to me!

• 10-4 Episode 2: Welcome to Visual Studio 2010

  Dec 27, 2008 at 1:15 AM

  I thought this was a very good video; I'm looking forward to lots more.

• Roz Ho: Reflections On Leadership and Believing in Yourself

  Dec 02, 2008 at 1:33 AM

  I first saw Roz watching Apple product release conventions on the web.  Roz would be introduced by Steve Jobs and would face all those ever-skeptical Mac folks in the audience and each time would win them over with her enthusiasm and intellect.  She seems more on top of her game than ever in this vid!

• Cakewalk: Making Music with Sonar

  Jul 15, 2007 at 8:55 PM

  I have a lot of respect for Cakewalk & have used it since the DOS days.  However, I found it a bit disappointing to hear the CTO, who himself admitted he first got into it because of Cakewalk Application Language (CAL) essentially dismiss it as "deprecated", offering no indication of what programmability features, if any, will be offered in the product going forward and pretty much ignoring the question about enabling the product to accept managed-code plug-ins or the like.
  
  For heaven's sake, you can't even record a simple macro in SONAR.  What up?

• InfoCard - Deep Architecture

  May 13, 2006 at 10:40 AM

  >> The whole "They might not have the .NET Framework" just doesn't hold water....
  
  Yes it does, if they want to support (and they stated they did) all operating systems.  That would include operating environments that don't have a Framework implementation.

• Alan Cooper - Questions after his keynote

  Mar 17, 2006 at 11:48 PM

  It's very enjoyable and useful to listen to passionate thinkers like Alan Cooper,  because his pronouncements make all of us think, and thinking is a good thing.  But life (and corporate life) is not black & white with no shades of gray; black & white pronouncements are a mismatch against shades-of-gray real life.
  
  For example, this business about how users are like kindergarteners and should never be allowed to be part of the software design process because software engineers are the experts, falls short in the real world.  At least in the many different corporate real worlds I've worked within during my career so far.
  
  In the real world, not every person in life is working in a job they are most perfectly suited for.  Some software users are much more sophisticated and knowledgable than others, some, in fact, actually become software engineers (funny, but most software engineers were once -- and still are -- software users).  Meanwhile -- and tell me you aren't nodding your head at this -- some software engineers should never, never, have gone into the field they now find themselves in, and, you find yourself mystified on an almost daily basis as to how they got through the hiring gauntlet and why they continue to be able to draw a paycheck.
  
  In that very real world I just described, it's often the case that when the "engineers" solve all the problems without including their "users", the most useless drek results that almost immediately needs to be trashed and rewritten.  And when a well-chosen set of expert users is included, a system that was about to become one of those turkeys gets rescued by the voice of sanity and reason from the right expert user being on the team at the right time.
  
  We engineers are often (hopefully) better informed than many users about back-end issues like server configuration or what data should be normalized or how to utilize network bandwith efficiently.  But when it comes to creating an intuitive set of features or user interface -- well, I wish my engineer compatriots were the "experts" that Mr. Cooper envisions are hard at work at the corporation and should best be left alone.  The truth is, some of these folk really really shouldn't be doing what they're doing.  Many of them have limited communication skills, interface design skills, people skills, or worse, enjoy doing things that technologically assist them in stuffing their Resumes, but could give a crap if the final finished system actually meets their user's needs.
  
  In most typical real-world situations, the users need to be involved cradle-to-grave -- presuming you want the system to actually meet the corporations' needs and provide actual value (a lot of stuff we produce DOESN'T).

• Mike Murray - What the guy who wrote shrimp and weenies memo is doing now

  Oct 12, 2005 at 11:52 PM

  I donated to Unitus!

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