Wanna Work on IPy + VS?

We've hired a few people around here recently (including me obviously). However, if you have a burning desire to work on IronPython (or IronRuby) and Visual Studio, we're still hiring:

An important aspect of developing these dynamic languages [aka IronPython and IronRuby] is providing support in the Visual Studio IDE. This includes editing features (color-coding of source code, intellisense, go-to-definition, refactoring, etc), debugging features (breakpoints, data tool tips, etc), ensuring a language-specific look-and-feel (interactive console, etc), and integration into the Visual Studio project system. It includes integration with the various designers like the WPF designer via CodeDOM, and development of project templates for various scenarios (Silverlight 2 app, WPF app, ASP.Net website, VSTT unit tests, etc). We also want to integrate with Visual Studio technologies like profiling and code coverage. Your job will be to ensure that developers using dynamic languages built on top of the Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR) have the best development environment in Visual Studio.

We’re looking for a talented developer with exceptional programming ability and a passion for dynamic languages. Experience in these areas is a bonus though not strictly required: building developer tools like editors and debuggers, compiler implementation, reflection, dynamic languages, VM implementation, performance measurement and/or optimization, C#. Applicants should have a BS/MS in computer science or equivalent, and three or more years of industry experience.

Morning Coffee 162

• Another nice thing about the new job: I'm working in the vicinity of some good friends. I was over in building 42 yesterday and made it a point to stop by Pat Helland's office yesterday and spend an hour or so chatting about the new gig. Pat is down the hall from David Hill, whom I worked with on Architecture Strategy. Back in my building, we're down the hall from the VSX folks including my friends Ken Levy and Gareth Jones. I'm sure there are more folks I know around, but hey it's only my second week!
• I'm a big fan of Carbonite, which I use to back up all the digital media on my home computer. With two little kids, we have lots of digital photos as you might imagine . However, one thing that bugs me about Carbonite is that it doesn't back up video files by default, you have to go in on a folder by folder basis and select "'Back up Video files in this folder" from the context menu. Given how much trouble this "feature" has given me, I imagine less techie folks don't even realize their video files aren't getting backed up. However, I will say the latest version of the Carbonite Software at least makes it easy to find files that aren't backed up. A quick sweep revealed around a dozen folders that had un-backed-up video files in them, which I promptly fixed.
• The big news yesterday was the new Google App Engine, which looks to give you access to virtualized infrastructure that sounds similar to what GOOG is rumored to use internally. I like Dave Winer's comment that this enables "shrinkwrap net apps that scale that can be deployed by civillians." Given Google's history w/ Python - Python's BDFL Guido van Rossum works there - it's no surprise that Google App Engine (GAE?) runs on Python, though apparently they "look forward to supporting more languages in the future". I'm guessing "more languages" == Ruby, maybe Erlang too.
• I wonder if/how Google App Engine will affect Ruby on Rails momentum? If there's a significant lag before App Engine supports Ruby, will that drive developers to Python web stacks like Django? (Django is included in "the box" with App Engine)?@ PyCon, I was surprised at the intra-language animosity I observed. I wonder how many Python developers are secretly hoping Google never ships Ruby support. I highly doubt Google would do that - they want to tap the exploding RoR market like everyone else - but I'd bet it would really take the wind out of Rails' sails if they did.
• Today's Michael Foord Link: Embedding IronPython 2, Examples of the DLR Hosting API. You can read the DLR Hosting spec, but it's pretty out of date so Michael's article helps fill in some of the gaps.
• Looks like PowerShell has gotten the open source community treatment in a project called Pash. While I'm sure others are excited about PS on Linux or Mac, I'm excited to see PS running on Compact Framework. I wonder if it would work with XNA?
• Speaking of XNA, XNA Console is a new CodePlex project that provides an IPy console to manipulate your XNA based game on the fly. Python is no stranger to game development - Civ IV for example provided mod capabilities via python. Alas, the compact framework can't run IPy today, so neither can XNA on Xbox. But wouldn't it be cool to hack your game in IPy running on a 360 using the messenger kit? (via IPy URLs)
• Bart De Smet gets functional, writing type switch and pattern matching in C# 3.0. I guess it works, but it sure is ugly. Why not just use F# and be done with it?
• Soma announces that the VC++ Feature Pack has shipped. Somewhere, I assume, there is much (some?) rejoicing.

Morning Coffee 161

• Huge perk of the new job: new hardware. I had to give up my Dell workstation but I got a Lenovo T61p dual core widescreen laptop, an HP dc7800 dual monitor quad core desktop and a Polycom CX700 IP phone. I'm really digging the Lenovo's integrated fingerprint reader - no more password login - but I'm most impressed with their integrated driver management software. Sure beats the heck out of hunting for dozens of updated drivers all over the place like most vendors for you to.
• Minor downside to all my new toys: I spent most of my first week on the job installing and configuring said new toys.
• Caps will face the Flyers in the first round of the playoffs which starts Friday. I have a feeling that I'll be feeling poorly Friday around 3pm and have to head home early. :)

DyLang Stuff

• Apparently, Michael Foord isn't getting enough exposure on this blog. :) He left a comment to remind me to mention the IronPython URLs link blog he writes along with Mark Rees and Seo Sanghyeon.
• Speaking of Michael, his employer Resolver Systems just launched a new product: Resolver One Quant.
• Still speaking of Michael, he's quoted in the InternetNews article Python Fans Take Aim at the Enterprise.
• My teammate Jimmy Schementi posts a preview of his spare time project "Silverlight on Rails". This RoR plugin lets you declaratively specify if you want your RoR controller code to be accessed remotely via AJAX and run on the server or if you want that code to be downloaded to the client and run in SilverLight. Very cool stuff.

Other Stuff

• Don Syme provides some insight into the F# producization process. There's going to be an update to the "Research release" later this month and a CTP of the "Product release" later this summer (Brian McNamara has the CTP details). I am looking forward to these releases, though I'll probably be too busy w/ IPy to experiment much with them.
• Speaking of F#, Matt Podwysocki continues his adventures with F# with a look at tuples, records and discriminated unions. Of the three, I find discriminated unions the most interesting since there isn't anything like it in other languages I've used.
• Gregori and Chris both announce the release of Unity 1.0. Congrats guys! But if I don't have time to hack around with the latest F# release, you can imagine I won't be getting to Unity any time soon...
• Jeff Atwood recommends you build your application UI first. Furthermore, he does a good job selling the value of paper prototyping as well as introducing the concept of PowerPoint prototyping. Money quote: "You don't want something too powerful."
• Via LiveSide I discovered James Hamilton's blog. Normally, hardware infrastructure isn't really my bag, but I find his ideas around using ISO standard shipping containers as modular data center building blocks fascinating. For example, check out this post that suggests sticking modular data centers in condos would be cheaper than building data centers!Subscribed.
• Speaking of ISO, you may have heard Open Office XML was ratified as an ISO standard. Obviously, there was a lot of controversy around this, but Miguel de Icaza lists of what he considers major community wins from the standardization process. Anything that "pushed Microsoft into more open directions" is a good thing IMO.

DLR Resources & Jobs

I'm back home from PyCon, but between digging out my inbox, finishing transition reports and doing my mid-year career discussion I'm a little busy. But I did want to point at a couple of recent posts from the IPy team blog:

• DLR Resources is a partial list of links to blogs (where's mine?), mailing lists, specs, whitepapers and websites related to DLR, IronRuby and IronPython. I especially want to call out Dynamic Silverlight which not only has lots of good information but also looks frakking sweet. Props to my so-to-be teammate Jimmy Schementi.
• Dev and Test Job Openings on IronPython, IronRuby & F#. We're hiring, so if you're interested in working on language development @ MSFT, drop me a line and I'll make sure it gets to the right people. BTW, I hear the IronPython PM position has been filled.

Things I Didn't Miss About Traveling

In my MSIT role, I only made two business trips, a training session with Thomas Erl and Tech Ed last year. I did travel for two presentations last fall, but both of those were on the conference's dime, not Microsoft's.

In other words, even though I haven't even officially started on the Dynamic Languages team yet, by going to PyCon this weekend I've already halfway to matching my total Microsoft sponsored travel of the past eighteen months. I used to travel all the time - the architect evangelist role I was in when I started this blog had about 35-40% travel. But boy I am rusty. Well, rusty maybe isn't the term, but I had forgotten how much of a pain it is to travel:

• When I got to SeaTac Thursday, the Alaska Air desk was mobbed but everyone was just standing around waiting. Their computers had crashed and they were waiting for them to come back up. I asked an Alaska Air employee what the back up plan was, you know in case the computers didn't come back up. "None" was the response. <sigh> I (and everyone else) ended up wasting a good half an hour before the system was operational.
• My flight was around 30 minutes late taking off and we had to circle Chicago O'Hare for a good 30 minutes before we could land. Plus it took 15 minutes for them to get the cabin door open.
• Internet service at the conference and my hotel has been pretty iffy. I'm not surprised by problematic wireless access at a conference (though it was greatly improved by the end of day one), but I wasn't expecting hardline access in my room to be so bad. Speed has been pitiful when it worked at all. I called tech support (after the hotel staff uselessly sent up an "engineer" with a network cable) and waited on hold 30 minutes before giving up and leaving me a message. They called me back literally 3 hours later, by then it was after midnight. I was still up since I'm on west coast time, but come on!

Once I actually got here, the conference has been great (specifics on that in a future blog post). A lot more stuff than I'd like is going over my head so far, since I don't have a grounding in Python's language model yet. But getting to meet folks and chat face to face is the most important reason for going to these conferences in person - most of the presentation content will end up online anyway. I'm also getting to hang out with my new team - we all went for Chicago style deep dish Pizza last night. I think I'm going to fit in just great with them.

However, there's one other huge difference between traveling now compared to traveling "back then": I didn't have kids before. Leaving my wife behind was hard enough. Leaving behind my kids as well is even harder. Explaining to Patrick and Riley that "Daddy has a business trip" and so I won't be around for the weekend as usual was exactly no fun. I'm taking a few days off in the job transition to make up for it. Hopefully, I'll be able to bring the family along on a few trips in the future, like I did for DevTeach. OSCON, for example, has been in Portland five years - that's just a few hour drive from Redmond.

But maybe I should wait until I officially start the new job before planning my next trip.

Joining the Dynamic Languages Team

After nearly two years in MSIT and six years focused on architecture across three different roles, I'm moving on to a new job in the Developer Division. In a couple of weeks, I'll be joining the Dynamic Languages team as a program manager. This is the team who ships IronPython, IronRuby, the Dynamic Language Runtime and Dynamic Silverlight. After seeing all the their cool work at Lang.NET this year, I just had to be a part of it.

As you might imagine, I'm pretty excited about this opportunity.

In the short term, I'll be primarily focused on IronPython, which is marching towards their 2.0 release. Towards that end, I'm attending PyCon 2008 in Chicago this weekend, though I don't officially change jobs for a couple more weeks. Longer term...well let's just say I'm going to be really focused on doing my part to get IPy 2.0 out the door and after that we'll see where things lie. This is a pretty big shift for me, so I'm explicitly trying to focus on short term work for the first six months in order to absorb as much knowledge as possible from the folks I'll be working with like Jim Hugunin, John Lam, Martin Maly, Jimmy Schementi and a bunch of others who I haven't met yet.

While this is a pretty big role shift, I haven't given up my passion for services and/or architecture. In other words, this isn't the last you'll hear about Kitchen Sink Variability, the ROI of EA or my perspective on Nick's Shared Integration Model. Obviously, with the job focus change, I expect focus on my blog to change as well. I'm not exactly sure how blogging fits into this new role, though the Dynamic Languages team is pretty open and many other members blog (as linked above) so I doubt I'm going anywhere. I'm going to try and keep blogging Morning Coffee, but I'm guessing it won't be quite as regular as it has been in the past. Unfortunately, I am going to stop coding F# for a while (sorry, Don!) I can't focus on learning two languages at once and obviously Python is my new top priority.

I wasn't in my MSIT architect role that long, but I feel that the "in the trenches" experience will serve me greatly for years to come. And of course, I will miss my teammates, especially Dale  who regular readers might remember from filling in around here occasionally.

Morning Coffee 104

• I'm presenting at a an internal training conference today and tomorrow, so my Morning Coffee roundup posts will be lighter than usual. On the other hand, I'm taking a bus downtown to the convention center, so I might write something more substantial on the way there and back. Or maybe I'll just read.
• My wife's blogging will also be light, because she's got her nose buried in a book. If I do read something to or from the conference, it's not that book because she won't let me near it until she's done! :)
• Speaking of "that book", Werner Vogel drops a few details about how well Amazon handled 1.3 million pre-orders that were delivered on Saturday (including our copy).
• First drop of IronRuby is available. For now, you can get it from John Lam's blog. Unlike IronPython, IronRuby will be hosted at RubyForge, not CodePlex, but the site isn't set up yet. Other big news is that the IronRuby team will be accepting external contributions. Are these encouraging signs to the Ruby community?
• More MS Research goodness: a new drop of Spec# is available. I've written about Spec# before, but haven't had the time to dig into it. (via Larkware)
• Scott Hanselman takes the red pill. Congrats!
• Speaking of Scott, he forwards on advice to remove a programmatic crutch. Good advice. Not to go all Petzold on Visual Studio, but I would guess the IDE is the biggest crutch out there. As for giving up compulsively checking email, if that's a goal Scott, I think you might have joined the wrong company...

Morning Coffee 37

Has it been a slow week for everyone, or just me my first week back from vacation?

• I got email last night from Pat Helland - he's re-taking the red pill. He starts in the developer division on Monday. He asked for my help getting is website up to date, so look for that in the near future. In the meantime, revisit some of Pat's hits: Metropolis, Data on the Inside vs. Data on the Outside, The Nerd, the Suit, and the Fortune Teller and his greatest hit Mr. CIO Guy.
• The new 4.0 version of the Visual Studio 2005 SDK is out. Details on James' vs.Eco blog.
• Next week is the Game Developers Conference. About a month ago, Dave Weller wrote that he had "been busy" and the XNA team blog has also been fairly silent. I have no inside information on this, but given that last years GDC was the first time we showed managed code running on an Xbox 360, the time is nigh for XNA announcements.

Morning Coffee 12

• According to Chris "Long Tail" Anderson (as opposed to Chris "Avalon Architect" Anderson), "Combined with the new low-cost distribution channels, from DVD to digital downloads, all you now need to be a filmmaker is talent." Really? Based on the dreck Hollywood churns out, I thought talent was optional! :) Seriously, check out his post and the sites he points to (Four Eyed Monsters and DV Rebel's Guide review on Cool Tools).
• Speaking of Chris "Avalon" Anderson, he's got a couple of WPF/E tests up on his blog. I wanted to see how it worked under the hood, so I checked out the HTML source for this page. It includes around 115kb of XAML! We've seen ViewState and JavaScript page bloat, is XAML bloat next?
• Larry O'Brien and Alan Zeichick are talking about a Threading Maturity Model. Good ideas there, but frankly I think we need a language that recognizes concurrency as a first-order abstraction if we're going to make much progress up the maturity model.
• Dare recommends programming.reddit.com. Definitely worthy of a closer look.
• The BTS training I'm in yesterday and today is being held on Microsoft's Red West campus, home of MSN & Windows Live. It's very nice looking and is a good size - five buildings - without being as huge as main campus. It even has a "ski-lodge" cafeteria, though given the slim pickings in my building's cafe anything would be an improvement.
• One thing I don't miss about working on campus is the commute. Getting to my office takes 20-30 minutes, depending on the traffic lights. Getting to campus, even though it's physically closer, takes 45-60 minutes, most of it spent sitting still. Every time I wish we'd move to campus, I remember the traffic and decide I like where I am just fine.
• Two big learnings from BTS training yesterday:
  • Conceptually, BTS hasn't changed much since the 2000/2002 releases that I was more familiar with. In practice, it has heavily embraced .NET which is a good thing. I didn't realize how much of a difference having tools like the pipeline and map editor inside VS would make, but it does. (I realize the orchestration editor is inside VS as well, but we get to that module of the class today).
  • The MessageBox is a bigger deal than I remember or realized. Matt called it the "heart of BizTalk". I know BTS has had a SQL based message store since day one, but I don't remember it being called out explicitly.
• I've said before that MessageBox is roughly analogous to SSB queues, though BTS wonks (like my teammates) typically jump down my throat when I do. MessageBox has a pub/sub design philosophy which SSB does not. However, I'm guessing pub/sub is used much more in messaging scenarios rather than orchestration scenarios. My efforts around SSB & WF are much more focused on orchestration scenarios, so I'm guessing SSB's lack of pub/sub infrastructure is not a big deal.

Morning Coffee 1

I gave up drinkin', I gave up smokin'
I gave up thinkin' all the time, stone cold revoken
No reason to my rhyme, I wasn't jokin'
If there's a phony bone in me, I want it broken
"Rub It In" by All Day Sucker

I'm trying to write more in 2007. Here's a roundup of stuff rattling around my brain:

• Fight On! So much for Michigan and their bleating about being left out of the championship game. Also, massive congrats to Boise State.
• Santa did bring me free time this holiday, but I spent it playing games rather than writing them. I'm digging Gears (big surprise) and Dead Rising, and I've starting playing Viva Pinata with Patrick. Plus, I finished GRAW which I had on loan from a friend just in time to start playing Vegas. Note I said "free time" which is to say time when I wasn't hanging out with my family. Typically during naps or after everyone was in bed, though I did skip at least one birthday party to play instead.
• We had a "surprise" snow storm two days after Christmas. Not enough to be dangerous driving, but enough to make a snowman with my kids. It's still there, though now that it's 55 degrees, I'm guessing it will be totally melted by the time I get home from work. It's been melting a little bit each day, so it's been like watching the climax of Raiders of the Lost Ark in slow motion.
• My wife and I finished watching season 5 of Alias last night. Fun, though it had really jumped the shark by Season 5. We watched the entire series on DVD, which really makes me wonder about the future of broadcast TV. We watched season 1 of Lost on DVD but we've been watching on TV ever since. I'm hooked on Lost, so there's no way I could go back to DVDs at this point, but I'm thinking that DVD is a better way to go for most TV. I wonder how this will change TV storytelling.
• I wish I could see how a show like Lost or Alias evolves over time. How much of the Rimbaldi story arc was mapped out before the show started? How did the production team deal with forced changes like Jennifer Garner's pregnancy or the apparently surprise series cancellation?
• I had 12 days off for the holidays, so it's very tough to be back at work. As I suggested above, I did very little coding while I was off, so getting back in the saddle won't be easy. It's especially hard on my little boy that I'm back to work. He was acting up yesterday which is fairly unusual. I finally asked him if he was sad about me going back to work and he broke down crying. I'm very lucky to be a part of such a tight knit family.
• I've been in my "new" job for six months, but it seems like longer. I mean that in a good way. It feels like I fit better in this job, on a much smaller team, actually building stuff instead of just "evangelizing" it. Nothing against evangelism, I just think I burned out on that job.

So starts a new feature on DevHawk. As you might guess from the "1" in the title, I'm hoping to make this a regular feature. As I ease back into work, expect more tech related nuggets along with the more random stuff. I should admit, however, that I actually don't drink coffee. :)

"Working" From Home As The Office Moves

New Microsoft Issaquah Black Building

Even though I moved offices just a month ago, we moved again today. New office won't be ready until Monday, so I "worked from home". Of course, with two kids too young for school, getting much actual work done is essentially impossible. I did manage to get my blog upgraded to dasBlog 1.9 during the kids' naps.

My new office building is "Issaquah Black" which is a much cooler name than "18" or "Sammamish C". The building used to be a Boeing building. In fact, my old next door neighbor used to work in this building, back when he and I lived a scant 2.5 mile / 6 minute commute from here. Boeing moved him to Everett and apparently decided to get rid of the building. A year ago, I moved to a new house on the outskirts of Redmond, so my commute is 12.5 miles / 20 minutes. Significantly longer than if I had never moved, but I love my house and can easily deal with a 20 minute commute. Even though main campus is closer (only 8 miles), with all the rush hour traffic it takes closer to 45 to get there!

Atlas Brand View, Wabi Sabi … and DevHawk?

Tanya, my cohort on the Architecture Strategy Marketing team, has finally - after much promising and subsequent delays - starter her blog. So far, just she's just written a hello world post where she explains why she named her blog "Wabi-Sabi".

Of course, long time readers are probably wondering: "Did he just say 'Marketing team'?"

Yes. Yes I did.

About two weeks ago, I was re-orged to be reporting to Norman. While you might expect me to be displeased about this, I'm really ok with it. First off, I was acting as the marketing director for about six months, so the fact that we now have three people doing marketing instead of just me is a huge bonus. Secondly, while I was acting as the marketing director (badly I might add) I was in total firefighting mode - no opportunity to do advance planning whatsoever. Now, I have the opportunity to focus on doing a great job on a few things well (like the TechEd Architecture track) rather than doing just enough to keep a ton of things from completely falling apart. It's taken a while to shift gears, but now I spend more time doing and less time running around like a chicken with my head cut off.

Finally, my move to the marketing team is inherently temporary. Yeah, it's fun while it lasts and I'm learning a ton, but don't think this is a long term career change. Before it even happened, Adam (head of Architecture Strategy) explained that he expects me to be over on the architecture side of the house "soon". Norman and I have already started planning that transition.

So get your "marketing slime" digs in while you can! (Apparently, we marketing slime prefer the term "marketing flacks".)

The Incredible Shrinking Inbox

My inbox is getting to be reasonable again. After two weeks on the road, it got up over 300 messages even though I cleaned it out before I left. Now, it's back down to 45 messages. I already use rules to break out messages that come to various mailing lists, that come to our team alias, or ones that I'm cc'ed on. I've realized that everything that comes into my inbox falls into one of three categories: shit I need to know, shit I need to do, and shit I don't need. I'm trying to be really diligent getting all these things out of my inbox. Shit I need to do gets moved to the task list. Shit I need to know gets moved into some other folder - usually by category though I have Lookout if I need to search for it. Shit I don't need gets deleted. Of course, once I'm done with my inbox, I've still got to tackle those nearly 400 messages in my cc, team and not to me folders. I'm hoping this will help me stay better organized - something I manager tells me that I need to work on (along with focusing on what's important and improving my diplomacy). One thing that taking this job has taught me, you can always get more email, whether you want it or not!

New Office

Almost our whole team moved offices yesterday. We used to be spread out across campus in 34, 40, 22 and 119. Now, we'll all be on one hallway in 18. It's a little unnerving to be able to walk the hall and see everybody after spending 6 months on a team who saw each other about once a month. Unnerving, but very very cool.

As you can see on this map, 18 is in the NW corner of the main campus. From the posters left behind, I'm guessing Mac Office used to be here - I think the whole Office group is moving to 36, the newest building on campus. (36 is so new, it's not even on the map yet. It's to the east of 3.) Not sure how nice 36 is, but 18 is much nicer than 22. About 30 feet from my office is a large lounge area with ~10 couches and wireless access. We have a full size cafe with ATM. And, now that we're on main campus, we're much closer to meetings with other groups (other than DevDiv - we used to be just across the street from them).

I was going to bring a camera and post some pictures of our new offices, but I forgot in a haze of sleeplessness. Julie and Patrick went to LA this morning for the weekend, and we had to get up at 5am to get her to the airport in time to get all the baby gear thru security. Since I can't post any office pictures, here's a picture of a nesting hawk my friend (and hoster) Tom emailed me.

My Work Bookshelf

When I first started my new job, I decided to blog the books I brought in from home to populate my new office bookshelf. Well, 4 months in and I've only just brought in my second batch. Here's what's up there so far.

• The Emergence of Sociological Theory 3rd Edition by Jonathan Turner et al (an old textbook of my wife's)
• Design for Community by Derek Powazek
• Writing Secure Code 2nd Edition by Michael Howard and David LeBlanc
• .NET & J2EE Interop Toolkit by Simon Guest (a gift from the author)
• The Art of Computer Programming (Vol 1-3) by Donald Knuth (a xmas gift from my dad)
• A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander et al (recommended to me by Greg Stone)
• Analysis Patterns by Martin Fowler (signed by the author)
• Design Patterns by the GoF
• Object Oriented Software Engineering by Ivar Jacobson et al
• Software Reuse by Ivar Jacobson et al