microsoft conversations with j - Channel 9

Steven Lees demonstrates FeedSync

JonUdell — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 22:54:57 GMT

To accompany today's FeedSync -- formerly Simple Sharing Extensions for Atom and RSS -- we recorded a screencast (Flash) in which Steven demonstrates the FeedSync samples project on CodePlex.

In this screencast you'll see two WinForms clients -- each a simple note-taking application -- synchronizing changes through a server-side relay. (Note that the relay is optional, endpoints can also synch directly in a peer-to-peer fashion.) You'll see how updates are reflected in the FeedSync-enhanced RSS feed, and how conflict resolution can be handled.

Steven Lees on FeedSync

JonUdell — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 22:50:19 GMT

In today's podcast with Steven Lees we discuss FeedSync, formerly known as Simple Sharing Extensions for Atom and RSS. FeedSync can do two-way synchronization of item sets across a range of protocols and topologies, handling both insertion and deletion of items.

One of the most intriguing uses of the technology, to date, has been a project led by Microsoft Humanitarian Systems, in Afghanistan, which enables Access databases outfitted with FeedSync adapters to synchronize through a relay in challenging circumstances.

FeedSync is an extremely general mechanism which can support software-plus-services scenarios, as in the Access example, or cloud scenarios, or any combination of those styles.

A conversation with Sean Nolan, chief architect for HealthVault

JonUdell — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 19:57:23 GMT

Today's interview with Sean Nolan, chief architect for HealthVault, continues the discussion that began two weeks ago with

Here's a small but telling example. If you've had one heart attack, weight gain is a strong predictor of a second one. A bathroom scale that can transmit readings to HealthVault could alert you to that imminent threat and perhaps save your life. But that's only possible when there's an ecosystem like the one HealthVault aims to bootstrap.

A conversation with Peter Neupert about HealthVault

JonUdell — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 17:19:23 GMT

An announcement on Microsoft PressPass today reads:

Joined by nationally recognized medical providers, health-management device manufacturers and patient advocacy organizations, Microsoft Corp. today launched Microsoft® HealthVault, a software and services platform aimed at helping people better manage their health information. The company outlined its vision for ways that HealthVault can bring the health and technology industries together to create new applications, services and connected devices that help people manage and monitor their personal health information, including weight loss and disease management, such as for diabetes.

Joining me for today's podcast is Peter Neupert, VP of Microsoft's Health Solutions Group. Our discussion begins with some backstory, including:

Lessons learned at Drugstore.com, where Peter was president, CEO, and later chairman.
The significance of Microsoft's acquisition of Azyxxi's health-oriented data management technology.
The significance of another acquisition, Medstory, which brought health-oriented search technology to the table.

Then Peter dives into the substance of today's announcement. The rationale is straightforward:

People want to be able to collect, and securely store, and share their private health care information which is today scattered all over the place, with doctor A and doctor B and hospital C, and wherever they were born. When you need it, it's very hard to recreate. If you're the family health manager -- the mom trying to take care of the kids -- you'd like to have all that in one spot. And oh by the way, by having that data in a data store that's accessible to third party applications, you might be able to get more value out of it.

There are two ways data can flow into your health vault. You can transmit it yourself, if you're using an electronic monitor -- say, for blood pressure or blood sugar -- that can connect to your PC and thence to the HealthVault. Alternatively, if your hospital's clinical systems can connect to HealthVault, you can authorize those systems to transmit data into the vault.

We've built the platform. We've implemented APIs both for devices and for applications. And we've created privacy and security policies to enable this very unique thing: arbitrary sharing of secure and private data with a third party application that I'm in control of.

Who will pay for this combination of software and services? Advertisers.

We've made it free to consumers and to software developers because we believe that when I'm doing my health query on skin cancer, I not only want to learn, I want to know how to take action. That enables us to deliver value to the consumer and to monetize at the same time.

As both patients and doctors know too well, the application of information technology to health care has, to date, focused mainly on the payment process. Today's announcement is an important step toward making better use of IT for actual health care.

Marc Mercuri on platform incubation and Tafiti

JonUdell — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 18:20:59 GMT

Today on Channel 10, Larry Larsen interviews Marc Mercuri who announces and demonstrates an experimental Silverlight-based interface to Live Search called Tafiti.

Marc works on the platform incubation team. In this podcast we discuss what platform incubuation means, how the Tafiti project exemplifies it, and what the future may hold not only for Tafiti but for a platform that's evolving to encompass both software and services.

Kentaro Toyama on MSR India

JonUdell — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 19:40:50 GMT

This morning I spoke with Kentaro Toyama, the assistant managing director of Microsoft Research India, about the mission of Microsoft's Bangalore-based research center. Our podcast touches on all six of MSR India's research areas. These are mostly the same kinds of advanced computer science problems that the other labs around the world focus on. Although it wasn't a requirement that each of these efforts be particularly appropriate to India, it turns out that one way or another they are.

India's wealth of mathematical talent, for example, is a tremendous asset for a research program in cryptography, security, and algorithms. Likewise its linguistic diversity -- there are 22 officially recognized languages, and several hundred dialects -- makes it a natural home for research on multilingual systems. And a country that's adding 7 million mobile phone subscribers every month is a great place to investigate mobility, networks, and systems.

There's also work in areas outside the realm of classic computer science. Kentaro Toyama leads an area called technology for emerging markets which tackles problems like how to create text-free user interfaces for people who cannot read. Obviously you need to rely heavily on graphics and on audio feedback, but there are fascinating subtleties involved. Simple icons don't work well, because they're not expressive enough. But fully realistic images don't work well either, because they're overly literal. It turns out that a cartoon-like approach is what works best, and within that discipline there are further subtleties -- for example, you want to animate the pictorial verbs, but not the nouns.

I was also fascinated to hear about related work in digital geographics, and in particular, about an effort to render map data in the style of hand-drawn historical maps. Why do this? Well for one thing, those old maps are beautiful. But as Kentaro Toyama points out, there's a non-aesthetic reason too. Maps produced by human cartographers communicate more effectively than machine-generated maps normally can. That's because cartographers use their intelligence and judgement to select and emphasize certain features at the expense of others. It'd be great to be able to model some of that intelligence and judgment and reproduce it software.

I've been to India twice. When I was 5, my family lived in New Delhi for a year. Then in 1993, for BYTE, I visited to learn about the software industry there. Maybe finding out more about MSR India will turn out to be a reason to go again.

A conversation with Doug Mahugh about his OOXML world tour

JonUdell — Mon, 30 Jul 2007 14:24:34 GMT

Office Open XML evangelist Doug Mahugh has visited more places in the past few months than many folks see in a lifetime. I asked him to name the places he's been recently, to deliver workshops on OOXML, and he rattled off the following list:

Let's see, New Delhi, Sydney, Czech Republic, Belgium, Slovenia, Munich, the Ukraine, Kiev, Beijing, Sao Paolo, Santiago, Bogota, Mexico City, Kenya, South Africa, then back to India.

In this conversation we talk about the skills, interests, and concerns of Office developers around the world, and about some of the applications they're creating. And we conclude with a story about a bus accident in Bogota that sounded scarier than it turned out to be.

A conversation with John Shewchuk about BizTalk Services and the Internet Service Bus

JonUdell — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 17:31:26 GMT

In Microsoft Conversations series I talked with John Shewchuk about BizTalk Services, a project to create what he likes to call an Internet Service Bus. The project's blog, with pointers to key resources, is here. There's also a Dennis Pilarinos illustrate the concepts using a whiteboard and demos.

I began our conversation with a reference to a blog item posted by Clemens Vasters back in April when BizTalk Services was announced. He described a Slingbox-like application he'd done for his family.

It's a custom-built (software/hardware) combo of two machines (one in Germany, one here in the US) that provide me and my family with full Windows Media Center embedded access to live and recorded TV along with electronic program guide data for 45+ German TV channels, Sports Pay-TV included.

Clemens did this the hard way, and it was really hard:

The work of getting the connectivity right (dynamic DNS, port mappings, firewall holes), dealing with the bandwidth constraints and shielding this against unwanted access were ridiculously complicated.

And he observed:

Using BizTalk Services would throw out a whole lot of complexity that I had to deal with myself, especially on the access control/identity and connectivity and discoverability fronts.

I began by asking John to describe how BizTalk services attacks these challenges in order to mitigate that complexity. We talked through a couple of scenarios in detail. The one you've heard the most about, if you've heard of this at all, is the cross-organization scenario in which a pair of organizations can very easily interconnect services -- of any flavor, could be REST, could be WS-* -- with reliable connectivity through NATs and firewalls, dynamic addressing, and declarative access control.

There's another scenario that hasn't been much discussed, but is equally fascinating to me: peer-to-peer. We haven't heard that term a whole lot lately, but as the Windows Communication Foundation begins to spread to the installed base of PCs, and with the advent of a WCF-based service fabric such as BizTalk Services, I expect we'll see the pendulum start to swing back.

At one point I asked John whether BizTalk Services supports the classic optimization -- used by Skype and other P2P apps -- in which endpoints, having used the fabric's services to rendezvous with one another, are able to establish direct communication. He said that it does, and followed with this observation about the economics of hosting BizTalk Services.

When we host it, we'll incur certain operational costs, so we'll want to recover those costs. But our goal is not to differentiate our offering from others because we host the software, it should be the case that Microsoft competes on an equal basis with other hosters.

In many regards, our motivations differ from other providers. Take Amazon's queueing service as an example. Because we've got software running both up in the cloud as well as on the edge nodes, we can create a network shortcut so that the two endpoints can talk directly. In that scenario, we don't see any traffic up on our network. All we did was provide a simple name capability, so the two applications end up talking to each other, using their own network bandwidth. We can use the smarts in the clients and in our servers to reduce the overall operating cost.

Now in that scenario, the endpoints are presumably servers running within an organization, or maybe across organizations. But WCF-equipped clients can play in this sandbox too. The idea is, in effect, to generalize the capabilities of an application like Skype, and enable developers to build all sorts of applications that leverage that kind of fabric.

That's a vision that many of us in the industry share. We'd just like to reduce the barriers to being able to connect our machines and our solutions. The industry's seen a bit transition to a hosted world, because that's been the easiest way to get universal connectivity. If a big organization with a whole bunch of high priests of IT were out there running the servers for you, then you didn't have to get your machine to be able to do that.

But sometimes I might just want to put those things on my machine, and if it were easy enough, wouldn't that be a great model? Why do I want to be beholden to some organization that's capturing my data? Maybe I want to have more privacy.

Of course there are benefits to moving it out to the cloud, but we think that should be a decision you make after the fact. Build your application to a consistent abstraction, then decide where you want the dial as the demands on the application change. If I'm just trying to do a quick video share with my friends, why do I have to create a new space? Why not simply say, here's the URL? And have that URL be stable?

Why not indeed. At its core the Internet has always been fundamentally peer-to-peer, but after a while we couldn't sanely continue in that mode. Things got too scary, so we built walls and created ghettoes. Technically our PCs are still Internet hosts but, except when they're running a few important P2P apps, they haven't really been hosts for a long time. It'd be great to get back to that.

A conversation with Pablo Castro about Astoria's RESTful data services

JonUdell — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 14:41:40 GMT

In the Microsoft Conversations series I talked with Pablo Castro about Astoria, a layer of middleware that makes data readable and writeable by means of a RESTful interface. Even if you don't know or care about the buzzwords, it's easy to show what Astoria does and to explain why it's interesting. One of the sample databases configured to work with the experimental version of Astoria is a subset of the Encarta encyclopedia. You don't have be a programmer or grok XML in order to appreciate the Astoria-enhanced version of Encarta.

A database with Astoria layered on top of it isn't a web application, but it's within shouting distance of being one, and you don't even have to shout very loudly.

Pablo's presentation at MIX is chock full of demos and explanations. Our RESTful web services -- a book that Pablo Castro says is "required reading" for members of the Astoria team.

A conversation with Bill Buxton about design thinking

JonUdell — Thu, 31 May 2007 20:42:14 GMT

In the latest episode of my Bill Buxton to talk about the design philosophy set forth in his new book Sketching User Experiences. Nowadays Bill is a principal researcher with Microsoft Research, and before that he was chief scientist at Alias/Wavefront, but his involvement in the design of software and hardware user interfaces goes all the way back to Xerox PARC. Along the way he's accumulated a fund of wisdom about what he calls design thinking -- a way of producing, illustrating, and winnowing ideas about how products could work.

I haven't yet received my copy of his book, but my background for this conversation was a talk given last November at BostonCHI, the Boston chapter of the ACM's special interest group on computer-human interaction. In that talk (which summarizes key themes from the book), and also in this conversation, Bill lays down core principles for designing effective user experiences.

He proceeds from the assumption that sketching is fundamental to all design activity, and explores what it means to sketch a variety of possible user experiences. His approach is aggressively low-tech and eclectic. He argues that although you can use software tools to create fully-realized interactive mockups, you generally shouldn't. Those things aren't sketches, they're prototypes, and as such they eat up more time, effort, and money than is warranted in the early stages of design. What you want to do instead is produce sketches that are quick, cheap, and disposable.

How would you apply that strategy to the design of, say, the Office ribbon? When Bill talks about sketching, he means it literally:

You'd start with paper prototyping -- quickly hand-rendered versions, and for the pulldown menus and other objects you'd have Post-It notes. So when somebody comes with a pencil and pretends it's their stylus and they click on something, you've anticipated the things they'll do, and you stick down a Post-It note.

What matters here isn't the interaction between the test subject and the prototype, because it isn't really a prototype, it's a sketch. Rather, what matters is the interaction between the test subject and the designer. The sketch need do no more than facilitate that interaction.

Continuing with the same example, here's how an eclectic strategy keeps things simple and cheap:

Now that will give you the flow and the sequence of actions, but it will not give you the dynamics in terms of response time. To show that I'd use exactly the same things, photograph them, and then make a rough pencil-test video so I could play back what I think the timing has to be to show it in realtime. It's a combination of techniques, where none is sufficient on its own.

Later in the conversation, he challenges some of my favorite themes. Bill's skeptical about the notion (popularized by Eric von Hippel) that lead users can be co-designers of products. And he doesn't think that logging interaction data is as useful as I think it is. But he agrees with me that a key weakness of paper prototypes is their inability to incorporate the actual data that animates our experiences of products and services. One of his examples: MP3 players think in terms of songs, not movements, so if you load one with classical music you'll find a bunch of duplicate songs called Adagio. In such a case, Bill admits, you'd like to have used a more fully-realized prototype that could have absorbed real data and flushed out these kinds of problems. His point isn't that you should never deploy heavier design artillery, but rather that you should reserve it for when it's absolutely necessary. Much of the time, he believes, sketching is faster, cheaper, and more productive.

A conversation with Justin Smith about syndication and REST in the Orcas release of Windows Communic

JonUdell — Tue, 29 May 2007 15:33:20 GMT

In version 3.5 of the .NET Framework, the Windows Communication Foundation will define a set of types that abstractly represent syndication feeds and items in feeds, and will provide mappings from those abstractions to RSS and Atom. In this conversation we discuss how this new support for syndication will work, and explore interesting scenarios for using it. We also discuss one of the underpinnings for syndication support in Orcas/WCF: a new ability to produce and consume services in a RESTful manner.

A conversation with Allen Wirfs-Brock about the history of Smalltalk and the future of dynamic langu

JonUdell — Mon, 21 May 2007 15:01:15 GMT

More than 25 years ago, Allen Wirfs-Brock created one of the early implementations of Smalltalk. He was working at Tektronix at the time, as was Ward Cunningham who became the first user of Tektronix Smalltalk. Allen later served as chief scientist of Digitalk-ParcPlace and CTO of Instantiations, then joined Microsoft four years ago. His original charter was to work on future strategies for Visual Studio, but recently -- in light of growing interest in dynamic languages at Microsot -- he's returning to his roots.

In this conversation we review the history of Smalltalk, and trace the evolution of the techniques that it (and Lisp) pioneered, from the early implementations to such modern descendants as Python and Ruby.

I'm always looking for ways to explain why dynamic programming techniques are so important, and a great explanation emerged from this conversation. A Smalltalk system is, among other things, a population of continously evolving objects that communicate by passing messages. That same description applies to another kind of system: the Internet. I suggested -- and Allen agreed -- that this congruence is driving renewed appreciation for dynamic languages.

A conversation with John Lam about the dynamic language runtime, Silverlight, and Ruby

JonUdell — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 19:02:23 GMT

On the Friday before MIX, I recorded this podcast with John Lam. He's the creator of RubyCLR and, as it happens, he joined Microsoft on the same day I did. John's been running silent since then, but no longer. In this conversation we discuss the dynamic language runtime (DLR), a generalization of Jim Hugunin's work on IronPython, and a quartet of languages that make use of its services. They include a refactored IronPython, a new managed implementation of JavaScript, Visual Basic, and a new implementation of Ruby which, unlike RubyCLR, does not rely on the C-based Ruby runtime.

We also explore the ability of these languagues to run inside Silverlight-equipped browsers. Key benefits include cross-language interoperability, access to Silverlight's subset of the .NET Framework, and more broadly, a new approach to writing ambitious browser-based software.

Jon Udell interviews Bill Crow about HD Photo

JonUdell — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 17:19:14 GMT

July 31 2007: Update from Bill Crow:

This is a pretty exciting day for all of us working on HD Photo. Today, the Joint Photographic Expert's Group (JPEG) announced a new work item for the standardization of a HD Photo as a new file format called JPEG XR (XR is short for "extended range".) You can read the full details in the Microsoft press release here and the JPEG press release here. (Go ahead and check it out; we'll wait here.)

For the last five years, Bill Crow has been working on HD Photo, a new image file format that's intended to supplant the JPEG format currently at the heart of the digital photography ecosystem.

I first met Bill many years ago when he came to BYTE to show us HP NewWave, which was probably the earliest effort to produce an object-oriented file system for Windows -- originally, believe it or not, for Windows 1.0. The connection between NewWave and HD Photo is tenuous, but it does exist in the sense that the metadata strategies we're seeing today (see the truth is in the file) point the way toward ending the tyranny of the hierarchical file system.

Today's

Along the way I learned a huge amount about the current state of digital photography. For example, I knew that pros prefer to shoot in RAW format, but I wasn't clear what that meant. According to Bill, a RAW image is just sensor data from a high-end camera, which photo processing software later turns into an image. The professional photographer trades away convenience for control and flexibility. In the case of the JPEG images produced by the vast majority of digicams, though, it's the other way around. We get usable images without any fuss, but we give up the ability to reinterpret the data. HD Photo aims for the best of both worlds: ultimate control and flexibility if you desire, convenience when you don't.

Although Bill guesses we're two years away from commercial HD Photo cameras, the format is being used today to support Photosynth. As he explains on his blog, a compressed Photo HD image has a regular structure that makes it possible to extract images at various levels of detail without decoding the entire image.

There's a whole lot more to the story. I hugely enjoyed this conversation, and I think you will too.

Jon Udell and Mary Czerwinski on interruptions, context reacquisition, and spatial/temporal memory

JonUdell — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 23:46:04 GMT

My guest for today's episode is Mary Czerwinski, a research area manager at Microsoft Research. Our conversation begins with a reference to the search strategy I used to recall Mary's name, which I'd seen in a SeattlePI.com story about a workshop on attention and interruptions that was held last month on the Microsoft campus.

Mary focuses especially on adaptive user interfaces that leverage our spatial and temporal memories. One of her projects, for example, presents thumbnail views of source code so you can see everything at a glance. Another project, called FASTDash, which was instrument them, log interaction data, and then analyze that data. This process supported the development of new user-interface techniques such as the Office 2007 ribbon. Going forward, it will support new "context reacquisition" initiatives that aim to help us recover more gracefully from interruptions.

Finally we discussed the January workshop's conclusions about the technical, social, and educational dimensions of the "infomania" crisis that it was chartered to explore.

All in all it was a fascinating conversation that is perhaps best summed up by Mary's motto: "AI (artificial intelligence) and HCI (human-computer interaction): Better together."

Jon Udell: Brian Jones on Office XML

JonUdell — Mon, 05 Feb 2007 22:53:39 GMT

Brian Jones has been working on infusing XML smarts into Office for six years. In this episode we discuss the history of, the current status of, and future prospects for XML-enabled Office applications.

Jon Udell: A talk with Marty Collins about blogs, architectural guidance, and technical marketing

JonUdell — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 23:34:57 GMT

Marty Collins is senior marketing manager with the solution architecture group responsible for msdn.microsoft.com/architecture and skyscrapr.net. She wanted to interview me about the relationship between blogs and technical marketing, and I wanted to hear her thoughts on the same subject, so we wound up interviewing each other.

She was interested to hear my take on how professionals -- not only in the field of software, but also much more broadly -- can and should use blogs to communicate their public agendas.

I was fascinated to hear from her about an upcoming marketing initiative to monitor blog discussions and address questions and concerns by injecting responses directly into blog comments. It's a radical but, I think, clueful strategy for 21st-century marketers.

Jon Udell: Chris Wilson on IE7, Ajax, and web standards

JonUdell — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 22:48:42 GMT

Hi, this is Jon Udell. In this first installment of my new