Entries for Mike Sampson

Be nicer in here [Be nicer in here]

Mike Sampson — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 23:50:40 GMT

I see a lot of threads that are getting pretty mean around here.

Respect your fellow niner even if you think he's wrong.

Bans will follow.

in reply to Be nicer in here

New Threads seem fixed [New Threads seem fixed]

Mike Sampson — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 16:12:12 GMT

Just another test...

in reply to New Threads seem fixed

Coup de gras [Coup de gras]

Mike Sampson — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 17:04:48 GMT

From: http://www.flickr.com/photos/nicfill/sets/72157616349485347/

in reply to Coup de gras

New mp4 size is too big [New mp4 size is too big]

Mike Sampson — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 20:54:57 GMT

I recently changed encoding tools on the back end and we're now making mp4s for the higher-res devices.

I'll make some tweaks. I'm loathe to add Yet Another Video Format but a mp4 High and mp4 Low might be good. Or I could just switch to mp4 low only.

Thoughts?

in reply to New mp4 size is too big

Halloween [Halloween]

Mike Sampson — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 07:31:21 GMT

Anyone go as something fun?

in reply to Halloween

Any Niners going to Blizzcon? [Any Niners going to Blizzcon?]

Mike Sampson — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 23:12:55 GMT

Dan and I are going to be there to cover the event.

in reply to Any Niners going to Blizzcon?

If you can read this, I fixed it [If you can read this, I fixed it]

Mike Sampson — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 20:04:01 GMT

If you can't then please reply below that you can't see this thread.

EDIT: I failed to edit this post

in reply to If you can read this, I fixed it

Sorry about the outage there... [Sorry about the outage there...]

Mike Sampson — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 19:48:55 GMT

I was updating the code and ran into some snags so I had to back it out.

Good news: Site works
Bad news: I'm going to have to do this again.

:)

in reply to Sorry about the outage there...

Test again [Test again]

Mike Sampson — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 16:40:14 GMT

Don't mind me...

Test..

in reply to Test again

People who can't login [People who can't login]

Mike Sampson — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 16:20:23 GMT

I'm looking into this now. I noticed that a lot of people who have contacted us about not being able to login have also recently requested password resets via email.

Are you getting these emails? The passwords in them work and allow sign in via the old school login page at http://channel9.msdn.com/SignIn. I haven't tested all of them but those that I have do work.

Are you just breaking on the Live ID sign in and/or the associate?

EDIT: Obviously you can't post since you can't log in. We are getting your emails using the Contact Us form so please use that to contact us.

in reply to People who can't login

Wrong Body Text [Wrong Body Text]

Mike Sampson — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 21:41:01 GMT

We think we fixed it.

Let us know if you see it again.

in reply to Wrong Body Text

Hey Manabi, I need you to test something [Hey Manabi, I need you to test something]

Mike Sampson — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 15:43:10 GMT

I have a fix for some of the user problems we've been having and I tried it out on your account.

Can you make sure you can do the following:
1) Log in but log out first (Let me know if you use LiveID or Old School Auth)
2) Post a reply to this.

I can see your profile just fine and all the data seems to have moved okay but I want to make sure there aren't any lurking issues before I do this to the 7900 other people who have this bug.

in reply to Hey Manabi, I need you to test something

v4 Bugs [v4 Bugs]

Mike Sampson — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 17:40:48 GMT

We're tracking them over here on our brand new wiki: v4 Bugs.

Please try and keep suggestions and feature requests off that page. Feel free to make another page in the wiki and link to it from the bug page for those.

in reply to v4 Bugs

Try out the beta again [Try out the beta again]

Mike Sampson — Fri, 30 May 2008 00:02:15 GMT

We made it faster.

http://beta.channel9.msdn.com

in reply to Try out the beta again

Text File Test [Text File Test]

Mike Sampson — Thu, 29 May 2008 21:25:55 GMT

Just the text ma'am

in reply to Text File Test

Vanishing thread bug [Vanishing thread bug]

Mike Sampson — Thu, 29 May 2008 18:59:52 GMT

Testing this in a normal forum

Go byebye?

in reply to Vanishing thread bug

New Sandbox Test [New Sandbox Test]

Mike Sampson — Thu, 29 May 2008 18:54:04 GMT

Testing a new post here with no tags or attachments

in reply to New Sandbox Test

Testing new thread [Testing new thread]

Mike Sampson — Wed, 28 May 2008 20:08:08 GMT

Just making sure my proxies work...

in reply to Testing new thread

Surprised by LINQ [Surprised by LINQ]

Mike Sampson — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 19:59:06 GMT

I have to say that before I got my hands on VS 2008 and really sat down to write serious code, I wasn't that excited about LINQ. I thought the DB access would be great for small or one-off apps and the XML stuff was nothing new. Some of the LINQ to objects stuff looked alright but I still wasn't that impressed.

Now that I've spent some time with it, I love it. The amount of operations that we do that can be expressed as set operations (projection via Select(), filtering via Where(), grouping, etc.) is nuts. I can rewrite entire methods as one-liners that just use query clauses properly. I'm writing a World of Warcraft combat log parser at home and so far it's basically 2 lines: create a RegEx, run a query that parses the file into an object graph.

Extension methods are quite nice as well. I can write Converter classes that move between our internal representations, for example Entry, to an external proxy object, Post, for returning from Web Services. The beauty is that Entry and Post have no idea about each other but I can still write thisEntry.ToPost(). I get awesome separation of objects and great syntax.

Anyone else out there having a good (or bad) time with LINQ?

in reply to Surprised by LINQ

Jack Gudenkauf - .Net 3.5 for ISVs

Mike Sampson — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 19:07:51 GMT

Several weeks back James Vastbinder was able to coax Jack Gudenkauf into doing an interview on .NET 3.5 targeted at ISVs. Jack is an Architect on the Base Class Library team and tasked to work with Microsoft’s ISV Partners.

In this interview:

Jack talks about the BCL team and how they work within the larger Server and Tools business unit.
An inside view of the new Add-In Model in 3.5, (Its Jack's baby and he's rightly proud).
The Process ISV should mentally walk through when moving to managed code.
Tools and utilities used by the CLR team.

Technorati Tags: JackG, CLR, .NET3.5, BCL, Add-Ins, Jvast, Microsoft

Perf and Stability of the site [Perf and Stability of the site]

Mike Sampson — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 14:55:45 GMT

So I made a bunch of database optimizations last week to fix some CPU issues we were having on our database server. We got a DB trace that covered an hour of time and I fixed up every query that was running longer that 25 seconds (turns out it was just two). I deployed those fixes (one was a new index and the other was a change to a sproc) Wednesday and Thursday of last week.

I was back east at a wedding all weekend so I didn't use the site much. Orcs didn't send us any "THE SKY IS FALLING!!!" emails so at least I didn't break it. You guys notice a decrease in random failures and crashes at all? Is the site speedier?

If you're not seeing improvements, is there anything that is consistently slow? We have some app pools that like to overzealously recycle so that's probably the cause for random errors but if there's anything that you can repro let me know.

Fixing up SQL queries and staring at Query Plans is a strange kind of fun. Taking a query from an estimated cost of 178 to 3 is quite the ego booster (as I'm sure everyone on the team can tell you as I've bragged about it 5 or 6 times). Thanks to Inside Microsoft SQL Server 2005: T-SQL Querying for my newfound SQL tuning powers.

in reply to Perf and Stability of the site

Fixing up some perf issues [Fixing up some perf issues]

Mike Sampson — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 20:33:08 GMT

I'm doing a little database sluthing now to help out with some misbehaving queries.

As I type this, I'm adding an index. Let's see how C9 handles while I'm doing that :)

in reply to Fixing up some perf issues

Wiki Syntax [Wiki Syntax]

Mike Sampson — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 16:37:11 GMT

So I'm working on the wiki (again) after getting the new media player code running and in David's hands (teaser!) and wanted to get some feedback on some of my ideas from the niners.

Most wikis use their own formatting language to change text, create links, make tables, etc. A lot of this was probably designed back in the day when the best editor you had was a text box element and you wanted the syntax to give you a bit of a visual clue as to what the final text would look like when converted to HTML.

Today we have nice rich text box editors and many more people understand how to write HTML. In this vein, I was thinking about using HTML directly in the wiki. There would be no double or triple single quotes to make things bold or italics, lists would use li tags, and images would be your standard img. Some things could remain from the wiki language: using [[ ]] to specify intra-wiki links for example. There would be an editor like there is today where you can use a rich WYSIWYG editor or switch to HTML view. The HTML would run through all the filters that entries run through now.

Thoughts? I think there is a continum here from no HTML to full HTML and the answer lies somewhere in between. Let me know where you think we should land. Post your comments and questions below and we can spec this thing out.

in reply to Wiki Syntax

If you get a stack on the Beta, please post it [If you get a stack on the Beta, please post it]

Mike Sampson — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 18:18:27 GMT

Also post if you get an "Oops" error after today.

For stacks the full stack is needed and for "Oops" we need the URL you tried to go to and how you got there (did you type it? did the site generate a link that was busted?).

Thanks.

in reply to If you get a stack on the Beta, please post it

What this forum is [What this forum is]

Mike Sampson — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 21:47:05 GMT

I'd ask that people wait to see the Beta before thowing out lots of suggestions. There are lots of things to see and comment on so I ask that you hold off on thowing things out there before then.

in reply to What this forum is