About two weeks ago I had the good fortune to spend some time at an offsite where I met Gary Flake.  I remember reading the Wired Magazine cover piece on Gary a few years back, but didn’t didn’t have any idea who he was when I was introduced to him at the offsite.  As one of Microsoft’s Technical Fellows, he’s basically one of the 20 or so smartest engineers in the company.  Spending time with a guy like that is a treat, and this guy thinks about stuff that gets me excited.  Data and systems.

It’s a good thing Gary is so good at his job, because when he gave me the initial pitch for Pivot I thought it sounded about as interesting as a new sorting algorithm [NOTE: the downloads are restricted to token holders, so if you are interested in getting Pivot, hit me up on Twitter and I will get you one].  It wasn’t a great pitch.  Only after I saw the software in action, and lifting my jaw off the floor, did I run back over to Gary and offer to rewrite his 25 word pitch.  My motives were not all together altruistic.  I wanted access to the software, but more importantly I wanted access to the tools to create my own data sets.

The unofficial, not blessed by Microsoft, but how I would talk about Pivot is: a client application to explore user created data sets along multiple criteria in a rich, visual way.  In short, it’s Pivot Tables + Crack + WPF.  The demo datasets that Gary was showing were interesting, but nothing about the data was actionable.  It was informational, but not insight generating.  My brain jumped to dumping CRM data into Pivot…or a bug database…or a customer evidence set.  Things that were actionable, traditionally hard to search, and would benefit from a visual metaphor.  Then, like a ton of bricks, it hit me.  What about Crunchbase?

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About 1 year ago I was fortunate to be working on the launch of Windows Azure, Microsoft’s cloud computing platform.  With the start of our new fiscal year, I was asked to take over a team which was responsible for the technical marketing for our developer platform product management team.  It’s been quite a journey, and I have been able to expand the scope of the products on which I am working.

Today, we are announcing the availability of the beta bits for Windows Server AppFabric, our platform for deploying and managing servers in the enterprise.  The needs of the enterprise developer now require that they think about not just deploying on the servers that they own, but also to servers that are running in the cloud.  The AppFabric technology is also integrated with the Windows Azure platform, allowing for the easy transport of workloads between your servers on-premises and to the cloud.

The functionality around hosting and managing services is critical when deploying new projects.  The AppFabric platform makes it easy to get a handle on what is running, and how it’s performing.  Additional functionality, which I believe will get lost in the press coverage, is the distributed, high availability cache.  Like memcached, our cache enables better performance for data intensive apps.  The high availability bit is new and could prove to be a game changer.

If you are already developing services and applications using the .NET stack, you are ready to go.  Head on over to the site and get the beta bits.  If you want to chat more about AppFabric, feel free to reach out to me.

Here in the developer platform product management team, we have kicked off a new campaign about the .NET Framework.  There are so many people doing so many amazing things with .NET, and we want to hear from you.  The site linked to above has stories from some of our customers doing some very unexpected things with the .NET Framework.

Those stories were submitted by our field, but now we’re asking you directly.  Are you a .NET developer?  Have you done something cool you want the world to know about?  Great, come share your story and get featured on the wall of fame.  Free traffic and visibility is never a bad thing.

For those of you willing to create a demo of your product using DemoMate from Impresys, you could win a car or a 12-day Galapagos Islands trip.  You heard me…Bob Barker says “come on down!”  We’re looking for interesting and unique solutions build on top of our stack.  Bonus points if you interop with non-MSFT technologies.  We have a distinguished panel of judges who will select the winner.

Last, if you are going to be at PDC, come to our party.  We’re working in conjunction with the great guys at .NET Rocks (who, incidentally, have a great dev focused podcast) to throw a party at 8pm in the Visual Studio/.NET Lounge Theater.  Free food, drinks, prizes…good times to be had by all.

I ran into an interesting bug this past wee when trying to install the beta 2 build of Visual Studio 2010.  I tried both the web bootstrap install and the full ISO download.  I also tried the Ultimate version as well as Professional.  Nothing seemed to be working.

It turns out that my machine configuration was the problem.  I am running a MacBook Pro for my personal dev machine, mostly so that I can dabble in multiple languages on multiple platforms.  I am using Boot Camp to run Windows 7.  My Windows partition is smaller than the Boot Camp partition.  In this case the .NET 4 Framework installer fails, and this is because it is trying to unpack to the largest fixed disk drive, and it doesn’t fail gracefully if that isn’t writeable.  The Microsoft Connect site has a post on this issue.

The workaround posted is to remove the drive letter from the OS X volume.  That works, but I wanted to offer up a different solution which may have longer term benefits for users who dual boot like myself.  I discovered MacDrive, and it’s a driver which allows Windows to write to an OS X volume.  Small download, and it has a free trial period.  Problem solved in about 1 minute.  You can uninstall the driver when you are done installing or upgrade.

According to the dev team, this bug has already been fixed, but it isn’t in the beta 2 build.

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;

namespace ScottHanselman
{
    public class HanselmanEffect
    {
        public int twitterClicks {get; set;}

        public HanselmanEffect(int minutesSinceTweet)
        {
            twitterClicks = 50;

            if (minutesSinceTweet >= 10)
            {
                minutesSinceTweet = 10;
            }

            Console.WriteLine("You should have {0} clicks",

                _(twitterClicks*minutesSinceTweet));

        }
    }
}

For the nerds out there.   Yes, there should be some form of degradation on this function, but you get the idea.

As part of a mini-campaign I am kicking off at the San Francisco StackOverflow Dev Days, I am upgrading any developer’s laptop to 2×2GB of RAM.  I really wanted to have some 2×4GB kits, but those were a bit out of the price range.  I am here all day – the guy in the bright orange shirt.  We will be doing a second act of this at the Seattle Dev Days, so if you are coming to the Seattle event, bring your laptop.

Why are we doing this?  Because every developer deserves more memory.  I don’t care if you are on a MacBook.  Running Ubuntu.  Using Eclipse.  Targeting MySQL.  It. Don’t. Matter.  Come see me and we will get you developing faster, because RAM makes everything better.

Love to see that people here appreciate what we’re doing. (Search Twitter)

Now that I am back as insider at Microsoft, I guess it would be uncool of me to poke fun at the length of the names that we have to squeeze in to our headlines for product releases.  Nothing will ever top my personal favorite “Windows Live One Care Family Safety Settings Beta."  Yeah, that happened.

Awesomeness ensues for MSDN subscribers who can download the beta bits on Oct 19th, and general availability will come on the 21st.  For those of you who want to wait until the product is formally released before you go play with it, you now know that you get to wait until Mar 22nd, 2010.  I prefer to get a head start with new bits.  I was an intern when we released Windows 95 beta, and had all 21 floppy disks from the building 17 receptionist.

The Visual Studio team is also kicking off their Ultimate Offer.  What is it?  A pretty cool program meant to give you, the developer, more free shit.  Free shit is never bad, but this is quite a stack of stuff. 

As one of the people who cares very deeply about our developer platforms, the release of Beta 2 is a huge deal.  No matter what type of application you want to build, .NET can help you get started.  If you stop and think about that for a second, it’s pretty amazing.  Your speed to solution is greatly improved by having so many building blocks available to you, but where the framework really shines is allowing .NET developers to take one set of skills and apply them to any of the UX experiences presented by the web, client, server, mobile, or even XBox/Zune.

As part of reaching out to the development community, we are kicking off a campaign meant to highlight some amazing stories of developers doing some pretty unexpected things with .NET.  In gathering personas for this campaign, I have had the pleasure of learning about some pretty awesome uses of .NET.  For sure, check out the stories, but also head over and share your own stories.

I am going to go on record here and claim that 2010 will see the rapid and inexorable decline of the popularity of the Netbook.  I have been using a Netbook for more than 6 months, and using it with Windows 7.  I finally gave up on my Lenovo S10 with 2GB of RAM.

While there have been scores of articles breathlessly extolling the coming panacea brought to you by Netbooks, I am calling bullshit, and in fact going to make the claim that the Netbooks will suffer the same fate as the Razor scooter.  In fact, for the true nerds, let’s do a cast:

netbook = (2009)razorscooter;

For those of you too young to remember when the Razor first came on the hipster scene, it was back in the late 90s, and could easily be used as a sign of dot com excess.  Everyone, it seemed, had one of these things, and yet no one, it seemed, was actually riding them.  People carried them around, or you had them in offices (for what purpose I don’t know, but I do know I was scooting to a meeting for which I was late when I saw my future wife sitting in the lobby of my dot com job).  Everyone had to have one of these things.  Then, just as quickly as they appeared, they largely disappeared from that scene.  Sure, you still see them around, and they are certainly for sale, but there’s no flash there.  The cool factor was gone once the lack of utility settled in.

The same fate awaits the netbook.  Let’s start with the issues.  I don’t care what people say about the use cases, the screen resolution for me, is the single biggest limiting factor for netbooks.  I suppose you can blame Microsoft and the new Ribbon UI element, but screen real estate is at a super premium on these netbooks.  I found that there were Flash ads which were designed to be 600 pixels high, and because of toolbars and what not in my browser, the “close window” text for the ad was below the fold, and the ad scrolled with the page.  Ugh!

Second, the Atom processor is not a suitable option for productivity software.  If you do anything remotely resembling serious browsing (more than a few tabs open) or have Outlook + a large PST file, forget about bringing your computer out from sleepy time.  Anytime I opened my machine and Outlook went to synch, the pain and suffering was acute.  Even worse if you hadn’t opened the machine for a day or so and had a bunch of meeting reminders pop up.  I also found that if I had 2 Office apps open, the context switching was sometimes painful.

Lastly, and this is the one that really irks me, the battery life was awful.  For such a small machine, and wimpy processor, the default battery would last 2 hours at most.  Not even enough for 2 meetings without having to travel with the power brick.  I borrowed someone’s 6 cell battery, and that made it marginally more tolerable.  When you think about how long a batter on the new MacBook Pro 13” lasts, the 2 pound trade off for the MBP is well worth the extra 5 hours of battery life.  Plus the bigger screen.  Yes, it’s more expensive, but I think the $300 price point isn’t going to be enough once people use these machines more and more, and come to realize their many shortcomings.

Ultimately I believe people was smaller/lighter form factors, but will grow tired of the toy factor.  You can get a decent laptop for $600.  I am not sure what market space the netbook ultimately occupies.

One of the things that I have been loving about being back at Microsoft is working in the Developer Platform team.  I have always been a geek, and have this latent developer hiding inside of me.  I love designing interesting applications and services, and love to roll some code when I can, though my close friends will tell you that it’s not a good idea to let me have a compiler handy.  I wish I had more time to work on those projects.

I have a very, very strong outside-in view on the developer platform.  My last company was built on Ruby on Rails.  I think Python is a beautiful language.  I want nothing more than for developers, all developers, to be able to excel at their jobs.  Part of my role now includes bringing that passion for customers and developers and focusing it on reaching out to the community of developers who doesn’t use any Microsoft products.

It’s strange for me to consider that there is an entire generation of developers who have never used a Microsoft product.  I still remember using Microsoft Word for the first time after using WriteNow on the Mac for all of my papers in high school.  To really date myself, ask me about my love for BankStreet Writer on the Apple II.

Thus begins my quest to speak to as many developers as possible to understand their development environments and hear their reasons why they aren’t using .NET.  I am sure to get some flippant answers, but I want to listen and process and really try to solve for X, where X is “how can Microsoft better serve this community of developers?”

This brings me to the mini-campaign at the TechCrunch50 conference.  I will be wearing the shirt in the photo here throughout the conference, and walking around with a Flip Mino HD talking to as many developers as will let me, with only one question: “If you do not use .NET, can you please tell me why?”  I am not going to say one word about any of Microsoft’s products; that’s not important.  What’s important is listening to this large and growing group of developers building amazing products using Ruby, Python, Django, Rails, Scala, Struts, Erlang, Haskell, Clojure, etc.  My top line goal is to listen, process, and then figure out what we can do to help those developers.

For anyone who wants to avoid the camera, you can always tell me on Twitter.  Why Twitter?  Because I want this to be out the open – the start of a conversation we haven’t been having.  Why my account?  Because I want people to know they are connecting with a person, a Director level person, at Microsoft, and not some alias.  This is a very un-Microsoft thing to do, and I have to give credit to my management chain for letting me go about this as if I were running a small startup.  Let the conversation begin, and remember: @BrandonWatson is listening.

…oh, and why you want to be ready for Scott Hanselman love

This afternoon I was sitting in a meeting discussing a potential upcoming marketing campaign to target developers.  It’s a great concept, and I am looking forward to seeing it come to fruition.  However, during the course of the discussion, it became clear that ad buys would be the primary driver of traffic.

My chief concern was that the developer audience uses ad blocker software at a higher rate than the general population.  We don’t have data on it, and no one was sure how to get it.  I asked the community at Hacker News, and was pointed to this posting about the downloads of AdBlock Plus.  That was a good start, but to really get an answer about which we could feel happy I came up with this hack to get quick and dirty numbers.

This is the part where I learned the following formula:

Scott Hanselman Influence + Survey Monkey + Basic Account = Fail

To get started, I created a survey up at Survey Monkey.  Unfortunately, the basic account has a cap at 100 responses for any survey.  I pinged Scott once I had the bit.ly link set up, asking for help from his tweeple.  I set up the bit.ly link so that I could track clicks on the survey, versus just knowing how many people took it.  Within, and this is not a joke, a few minutes, I had hit my cap.  Whoops.  Within the time it took me to get a credit card into the system, I lost about 150 to 200 clicks.  I would never have known about the survey being closed had @BrianGorbett been on the spot to point it out.

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