Duncan Mackenzie

Modeling Through the Ages

Duncanma — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 15:37:00 GMT

Watch a short video that depicts the humble origins of modeling and humorously traces modeling’s evolution from the beginning of history to present day, with Microsoft new modeling platform, “Oslo.”

Dev Diary for April 23

Duncanma — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 22:43:01 GMT

We're back with another update! This time we have a mix of content, including:

Sampy talking about SQL optimization using indexed views
Erik covering a relatively simple, but useful, web control and explaining a bit about how we build our UI components as he goes (and you can get the controls he demos right from here)
Sampy showing off the wiki, in a unskinned but functional state (like any good demo, we even included a surprise error!)
Me demoing nothing and generally blathering on in a managerial way

Dev Diary for April 15th

Duncanma — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 23:36:12 GMT

Just a quick, and poorly filmed, update from the dev team on what we worked on during the last sprint and what we are building right now. Yes the filming is shoddy, and yes the screens are hard to read... we'll get better, but we didn't want to spend a lot of time redoing this one when we know you'd rather we keep focused on developing the dev site :)

Mohsen Agsen: Bridging the Gap between PC and Enterprise, Developer and Designer

Duncanma — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 18:11:57 GMT

A rolling stone gathers no moss. What it does gather, however, is a great deal of experience. During his long career at Microsoft, Mohsen Agsen has been actively avoiding gathering moss. LAN Manager, MCS, bCentral, Exchange, Visual Studio and … oh yes … games too. These are just a few of the products and technologies that Mohsen has been involved in. At each step along the way, he's built and maintained a reputation for being a strategic thinker and technical leader.
During this episode, we discuss with Mohsen some of the challenges that Microsoft has faced in the past, and learn how not just Microsoft, but the industry in general can deal with the challenges of today.

The Channel 9 beta has been updated

Duncanma — Sat, 29 Sep 2007 09:42:48 GMT

Hey folks, it has been awhile since we first published the Channel 9 beta site and we thought you might be wondering where we are with the whole 'new Channel 9' project. Well, we have been moving forward on many different areas of the code and we even shipped a new production site (http://Channel8.msdn.com) built on the exact same code base. All of the work done since we last updated the beta site is hard to describe in a few lines of text, but let me give it a shot anyway :)

First and foremost, we have added the idea of 'managed tag pages'. These pages take the idea of filtering content by a certain tag and then add in the concept of an 'editor' for that tag's area. The editor will be your guide to the topic in question, selecting content from Channel 9 to feature on the page, blogs that should be included and more. We haven't fully configured it, but you can see an example of what I mean on the Silverlight tag page, where Adam Kinney is designated as the ownere of that page. You still get your straight filtered list of videos (right in the what's new area) but you can also see recommended or featured content along the upper right. We have more planned for the managed tag pages, but for now I hope this gives you an idea of what is to come in that area.

The other major change is around the style of the site. In addition to a ton of minor changes, (many of which were as a direct result of feedback from you Niners), the site was made much more consistent overall. The fonts, HTML tags and information displayed have been standardized around the site; an entry displayed in the sidebar on one page should look exactly like another... this has the benefit of a better experience for you, and it also really simplifies our code, which is a great help for when we need to make ongoing changes or even launch a new site based off the same code.

Finally, we heard your comments around the new AJAX asynchronously loading of posts, threads and comments, and we acted on some of that feedback in this update. Your back button should work now, even when all you are doing is paging through the videos on the media page or all the comments on the current post. If you watch the address bar you'll also see that the page number is part of the URL, and that it is being updated as you page back and forth. With those URLs you'll be able to link someone right into a specific page in a discussion, as requested by your feedback on the first Beta site we shipped. The AJAX features have a bunch of other improvements added to them as well, including a 'throbber' animation to let you know when we are loading data and other less obvious changes.

Check it out over at http://beta.channel9.msdn.com and let us know what you think in the recent set of Halo 3 videos :)

A quick chat with Microsoft's CIO about the ACE Team

Duncanma — Wed, 22 Nov 2006 21:08:05 GMT

The Application Consulting & Engineering team (ACE Team) assesses all of Microsoft’s line of business applications for privacy and security vulnerabilities. ACE Team founder and Director Todd Kutze and Microsoft CIO and VP Managed Solutions Ron Markezich talk about the ACE Team and its impact on the company

The ACE team at Microsoft: Threat Analysis and Modeling

Duncanma — Wed, 22 Nov 2006 21:02:23 GMT

The Application Consulting & Engineering team (ACE Team) assesses all of Microsoft’s line of business applications for privacy and security vulnerabilities. Senior Security Technologist Talhah Mir discusses the Threat Analysis and Modeling tool he has designed and which is being implemented. Security Technologist and Training Coordinator Ricardo Birmele talks about the ACE Team training program and its money saving benefits to Microsoft application development teams.

Software Security at Microsoft: ACE Team Tour, Part 3

Duncanma — Tue, 24 Oct 2006 04:53:03 GMT

The Application Consulting & Engineering team (ACE Team) assesses all of Microsoft’s line of business applications for privacy and security vulnerabilities. This discussion among Ahmad Mahdi (Security Technologist), Ricardo Birmele (Security Technologist and Training Coordinator), Talhah Mir (Senior Security Technologist), Chris Lundquist (Performance Technologist), and Tony Dang (Privacy and Program Manager) talk about what it involved in the assessment process. Robert Scoble conducts the interview.

Part 1

Software Security at Microsoft: ACE Team Tour, Part 2

Duncanma — Tue, 24 Oct 2006 04:49:16 GMT

The Application Consulting & Engineering team (ACE Team) is chartered to assess all Microsoft line of business applications for security and privacy vulnerabilities. Security Technologist manager Shawn Veney, speaks eloquently about what it takes to conduct security assessments, and what’s behind our security philosophy. Robert Scoble conducts the interview.

Part 3

Software Security at Microsoft: ACE Team Tour, Part 1

Duncanma — Tue, 24 Oct 2006 04:44:11 GMT

The Application Consulting & Engineering team (ACE Team) is chartered to assess all Microsoft line of business applications for security and privacy vulnerabilities. ACE Team founder and Director Todd Kutze tells us about its activities, organization, and purpose. This is a Scoble interview.

Part 3

Windows Starter Edition -- One Million Served and still growing

Duncanma — Tue, 10 Oct 2006 18:00:12 GMT

We recently hit a bit of a milestone, passing the one million mark of installed copies of Windows Starter Edition, a version of Windows XP (and now Vista) specially designed for use in emerging markets. You can read more about the Starter Edition, and see a cool interactive map (IE only!) of where it is in use or you can click play on our video!

I interviewed two folks on the team about why this product was developed and some of the interesting things they learned about computing in emerging markets along the way.

VSTO 2005 Second Edition Beta: Thomas Quinn

Duncanma — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 21:20:24 GMT

Thomas Quinn is the Architect for the Visual Studio 2005 Tools for the 2007 Office System (code name "Cypress"). TQ discusses the engineering decisions behind the design of the tools. He explains the decision to create a new base project type that allowed the team to create Application Add-in projects for both Office 2003 and Office 2007. He explains the rationale behind the change to the Outlook Add-in project type. After watching this video, please visit his blog and download sample code http://blogs.msdn.com/tq

VSTO 2005 SE Beta is the recommended tool for developing for the 2007 Microsoft Office System Beta 2 Technical Refresh. You can download the tools from the Office Developer Center http://msdn.microsoft.com/office/tool/vsto/2005SE

VSTO 2005 Second Edition Beta: Martin Sawicki

Duncanma — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 21:15:44 GMT

Martin is the program manager responsible for this release of the Visual Studio 2005 Tools for the 2007 Office System (code name "Cypress"). In this interview, Martin discusses the scope of this release of Visual Studio Tools for Office, with a focus on installation and deployment. His responsibilities on this project included anticipating the different setup configurations that developers would experience, and mitigating any version compatibility issues. If you're installing the VSTO 2005 Second Edition Beta, then you must watch this interview with Martin Sawicki!

VSTO 2005 SE Beta is the recommended tool for developing for the 2007 Microsoft Office System Beta 2 Technical Refresh. You can download the tools from the Office Developer Center http://msdn.microsoft.com/office/tool/vsto/2005SE

XNA at Microsoft Gamefest

Duncanma — Mon, 11 Sep 2006 16:24:11 GMT

Ernie Booth headed over to the Microsoft Gamefest 2006 (http://www.microsoftgamefest.com), a conference for game developers held in Seattle, and interviewed Boyd Multerer and David Weller about the new XNA platform. Check out http://msdn.microsoft.com/directx/xna/ for more info on XNA itself.

CodePlex: Shared Source coupled with Agility == Happy Team

Duncanma — Thu, 17 Aug 2006 17:00:30 GMT

Meet the CodePlex team. They are a very innovative group of passionate people who all work in the same office. Yep. One team. One office. It makes for a very agile and tight knit product team and the CodePlex team model is quickly becoming the next big wave here at Microsoft in terms of product team architecture. Of course, besides talking about agility and office design, we get into some of the details of CodePlex, which is a shared source community development site written on top of Team Server and pluggable into your VS environment. Really great stuff.

Learn more here: http://codeplex.com

Jason Zander on the WinFX to .NET FX 3.0 rename

Duncanma — Wed, 19 Jul 2006 08:39:18 GMT

Ok, just when we all had the WinFX name firmly stuck in our heads, they went and changed it! Why? What does this mean for you? What folders will you end up with in your Microsoft .NET directory? All these answers and more in this interview Duncan did with Jason Zander from the .NET Framework team.

An interview with Jamie

Duncanma — Tue, 18 Jul 2006 18:27:10 GMT

After the release of Channel 9 Patrol, we just had to get Jamie into a C9 interview of his own. So Duncan flew to Toronto... really...

Active Search in Windows Live Mail Desktop

Duncanma — Mon, 17 Jul 2006 23:01:23 GMT

It seems we missed some features in

How Developers can Extend IIS 7

Duncanma — Thu, 13 Jul 2006 08:44:32 GMT

Brett (IIS Technical Evangelist), Thomas (IIS Group PM) and James (DPE Group Manager and the guy behind the camera) discuss the many ways you can extend the IIS 7 pipeline, UI, and troubleshooting in IIS7. Thomas shows off an end-to-end demo that is available on IIS.net.

Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Database Professionals

Duncanma — Thu, 06 Jul 2006 20:26:43 GMT

Cameron Skinner, Gert Drapers, Robert Merriman, Thomas Murphy, and Matt Nunn sat down with me to discuss a new edition to the Visual Studio Team product family: Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Database Professionals. We talked about why this product was created and Cameron (the product unit manager) gave a walk through of the current CTP release. Targeted for delivery at the end of the year, you can grab the CTP bits and learn more at the team’s website: http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/teamsystem/dbpro/

Where is ZAM3D heading to? Electric Rain 3D Demos

Duncanma — Fri, 30 Jun 2006 07:27:58 GMT

Want to know where ZAM3D is heading to? Check out a very interesting conversation with Mike Soucie who will also show us some conceptual demos that Electric Rain has prepared using ZAM3D and Expression.

Advanced Modeling. Incorporating 3D into Expression (ZAM3D)

Duncanma — Fri, 30 Jun 2006 07:23:38 GMT

It is time for some advanced tricks to model 3D objects. In this video you'll learn more advanced features that ZAM3D offers to create great looking 3D models. At the end you will be toured on basic techniques to incorporate your models into Expression Interactive Designer.

Basic Extrusion, Lathe, Textures, Animation (ZAM3D)

Duncanma — Thu, 29 Jun 2006 02:12:27 GMT

In this second video Jim Foley continues the amazing presentation by showing us different techniques to work with 3D. Learn how to create basic 3D extrusions and lathes as welll as add textures and basic animation.

Nathan Dunlap talks about WPF from a designer's perspective

Duncanma — Fri, 16 Jun 2006 21:26:02 GMT

Karsten Januszewski interviews Nathan Dunlap, a design extraordinaire who has been the design lead on numerous WPF applications. His blog, Designers Love .NET (http://www.designerslove.net ), is indicative of his enthusiasm for the platform and perspective as a designer. In this video, he talks about some of his design experience with WPF, especially best practices around designer/developer with today’s tools. He also introduces a screencast (http://www.projectglidepath.net and watch as Michael explains the purpose and inner workings of this new way to develop software for Windows Vista and the .Net 3.0 Framework.