Tuesday, August 12, 2003

In yesterday’s post, I did not mean to imply that I was some kind of internal David against the MS Goliath. I am in the majority of employees when I say that I want to keep in mind what’s best for the customer. The only issues, really, are what is best for the customer and how can those needs be met within the limits of our resources. We do spend quite a bit of time arguing over those, however. : )

Here. Another one where I quote Dr. Seuss.

After a few weeks at Microsoft, when I was feeling particularly frazzled with my work and travel schedule, Peter Drayton pulled me aside to reinforce what I’d heard before: the first 6 months at MS suck for everyone; after that, you either hate it forever or you can’t ever imagine working anywhere else. At that point in my budding MS career, I was leaning towards the former. Peter, having been there, said that he’d gotten a piece of advice that had seen him through.

The advice was simple: have an agenda. The idea is, no matter what projects you work on, no matter what groups you go to, no matter what tasks you’re into that day, to have an underlying agenda that pushes you forward and drives your decisions. Businesses call such a thing a “vision statement.” Authors call it a “story.” Whatever you call it, it’s always helpful to have one and here’s mine:

“Remember what it’s like to not work at Microsoft.”

That’s it. That’s my goal. Of course, as with all things, Dr. Seuss says it better than I can:

“I am the Lorax. I speak for the trees. I speak for the trees, for the trees have no tongues.”

I consider it my mission to speak for the thousands of developers that I've known and talked to over the years that have no tongue inside Microsoft.

This came up just this morning on the phone with a colleague of mine at MS. He said, “We need to maintain the value of X.” I replied, “I don’t care about the value of X. I care about enabling our customers to get the most out of our products.” Of course, there are hundreds of people concerned with X inside of MS and they would be less than happy that I’d dismissed the value of it, but that didn’t matter to me. What mattered was being the kind of developer advocate inside of MS that had helped me when I wasn’t there and to be a constant reminder to my colleagues of the needs of those folks.

Since MS was founded by developers and run by developers (which has its pros and cons), I plan on being more successful than the Lorax.

Here. Finally somebody has done a good job with text-to-speech (everyone seems to be concentrating on the other direction these days). I *so* want to hook this up to Project Gutenberg [1] and my mp3 player. [1] http://gutenberg.net/

Here. Atif Aziz built a generic VS.NET code generator shim that allows you to build a code generator that plugs into VS.NET by implementing a single method. Cool.

Here. Raymond provides another Windows history lesson, this time about why Registry files are called "hives."

Here. BloggerCon is a user conference, which would be very new to me (I've only ever attended developer conferences). Have there been previous BloggerCons? If so, how have folks liked them?

Here. FormatDesigner is an application to experiment with the format strings used to format data in String.Format and various type's ToString functions.