Paul Hammond's Blog

I work in one of Microsoft’s MSN development teams in London, and our team is looking for Software Testers.  There is one role already advertised, and a Lead role that will be published later this week.

If you are a developer or tester looking for a new challenge, and you would like to work for Microsoft/MSN, check out the job descriptions here: http://london-msn-jobs.com/.

Microsoft's new financial year is just around the corner (July 1) and with it comes many new challenges for MSN International.  We have a couple of open positions in the PM and test disciplines, and will likely open up developer positions as demand for work increases over the year.

If you are interested in finding out more about working in a dynamic and fun environment while delivering fantastic interactive experiences to millions of Internet users around the world, please take a look at our site at http://london-msn-jobs.com/.

Microsoft has released Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1.  The release is intended for Web Developers and Designers so that they can be ready to take advantage of the new features that are offered.

There are a number of important changes from a developer's perspective.  The main areas (unashamedly cut-and-pasted from the Microsoft site) are:

• Choice of layout engine (IE5 quirks mode, IE7 strict, IE8 standards).
• CSS2.1 Compliance.
• HTML Improvements (fixes to cross-browser inconsistencies).
• Improved Namespace Support.
• Performance Improvements (in multiple subsystems).
• Developer Tools.

You can read full details for these items over at the Features page on the Microsoft site under the "Faster, Easier" section.

I just installed the software, and the one feature that immediately caught my eye as a developer was the Developer Tools dialog.  Microsoft shipped the IE Dev Toolbar before, which was nice, but this is built right into the application.

I particularly liked the CSS hierarchy feature.  You can select an element in the HTML tree, and it shows you all of the CSS that has been applied to it, and where in the hierarchy it came from.  You can turn the individual items off to see what effect that has.

The Layout tab also gives you details about the layout for the currently selected element.  In this example, you can see the size of the element itself, the padding, the margins and the offset from the parent.

You can also switch between the three compatibility modes and the rendering of your page will update immediately.

The Outline tab has many of the features of the original Outline options in the IE Dev Toolbar, allowing the visual outlining of tables, tables cells, divs, etc.

The Script tab in the left pane gives you a whole load of debugging features that I didn't look at yet.  Judging by the UI, the debugging features are going to be very comprehensive.

While looking through the site, I also found a link to the Internet Explorer Developer Center, which has some excellent resources.  This includes full details on using the Developer Tools, as well as Defining Document Compatibility in your HTML using the X-UA-Compatible meta tag, and VPCs for IE6, 7 and 8.

For more information about other new features in IE8 (such as Activities and Web Slices), check out the main Internet Explorer 8 Download Page.

Visual Studio 2008 and .Net 3.5 were released to manufacturing (RTM) on Monday just gone.  Here is a link to the main Visual Studio 2008 Developer Center.

Scott Guthrie has a blog posting about the VS2008 release here.

More importantly, he has a posting about uninstalling Beta 2 of Visual Studio 2008 here. 

I think I will still probably rebuild my laptop instead of risking the uninstall process.  In the past I have always ended up with random Beta bits hanging around and it just makes everything unstable.  That is the price of early-adoption I guess.

Microsoft's development tools and technologies go from strength to strength and I am proud to be part of this company.  Congratulations to all on the VS team!

A while ago I came across a blog post on the Live Search blog called "Add Search to Your Site with the Live Search Box".  You can basically set up a fully featured site search using and simply include it in your page.  You can select what "zones" to search (for example just your site, or your site and the web, multiple sites etc), and there is a choice between a really nice dynamic HTML version, and a plain vanilla HTML version.

I have added the feature to the top right hand side of my blog.  Simply type a query and press the button.  Since my site has been pretty well indexed by Windows Live Search, the results are very good.  I will be removing the other search box soon in favour of this one.

One thing I would like to see is a revenue share for the paid ads that appear in the search results (a la Google AdSense).

Follow the link above to read about how you can add the feature to your own site or blog, or go straight to the Windows Live Search Site Owner page to get started.

Further to my post last week regarding the Visual Studio SP1 Beta, SP1 has now been formally released - links below.

• General Information.
• Visual Studio® 2005 Team Suite SP1 (covers Standard, Professional and Team editions).
• Visual Studio® 2005 Team Foundation Server SP1
• Visual Studio® 2005 Express Editions SP1

Whilst this should fix a number of issues in VS2005 running on Vista, there is a Vista specific update to SP1 (called "Visual Studio 2005 SP1 Update for Windows Vista") due early in 2007.  The "General Information" link above mentions a beta of this update "coming soon".

A couple of weeks back I blogged about getting Web App Debugging working on Windows Vista RC1, and I mentioned an annoying "attempted to read or write protected memory" error when building your solution.

Brian Peek (whose solution I originally quoted in my first post) kindly left me a comment with a possible solution to the memory issue:

"Hey there...saw your link to my site on the IIS debugging stuff.  You may be able to get rid of the memory protection issues by installing VS2005 SP1 Beta 1 at:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/results.aspx?pocId=&freetext=Visual%20Studio%202005%20Service%20Pack%201&DisplayLang=en

I haven't managed to test this yet (since I have now installed the RTM version of Vista and the error is no longer happening), but if you are getting the memory error on pre-RTM Vista builds, you might want to install the SP1 Beta.

Thanks again Brian!

My good gamer-friend Darren just sent me this link to Game System Wars - it is a round up of various sales statistics for the 3 games systems, with the data pulled from Amazon.  Right now, Xbox 360 leads the way in all categories (as you would probably expect, since it has been out for longer).  It will definitely be interesting to see how things change in the coming weeks and months.

I went to Best Buy and Circuit City here in Redding last night.  Best Buy had about 15 tents in a line, and Circuit City had a couple, waiting for the PS3 launch today.  One of the Best Buy employees said the tents arrived on Tuesday.  I read in the paper there are PS3's on Ebay for upwards of $2500.  People really do love their game systems...

On a slightly unrelated note, Circuit City had a ton of Microsoft Zune players available for sale.  I had a quick play with one - the screen is really bright, and the UI is nice.  When they do one with more hard disk space, I could possibly be tempted over from the dark side.

I recently got a new laptop and am running Windows Vista RC1.  I had been having a bunch of trouble getting Visual Studio 2005 to behave, particularly when trying to debug web applications.  It took me a little while to figure out, and I had to pull together a few different resources from the web in order to get things working.  I thought I would document them all together here for others to take advantage of (and so I can find them later if I need them!)

When creating web applications, I wanted to use "Local IIS" instead of "File System".  This requires the "IIS 6 Management Compatibility" option installed within IIS7.  Also, once this is installed, you still need to run Visual Studio as administrator for this to work.  Scott Guthrie has a blog post entitled "Tip/Trick: Using IIS7 on Vista with VS 2005" that includes screen grabs of these two steps.

Once this was working, I was still having trouble debugging web applications.  Brian Peek has a post with three simple steps to ensure debugging works correctly:

1) In the "Internet Options" control panel, go to the Security tab.  Add "http://localhost" to your list of "Trusted Sites"
2) Again, for "Trusted Sites", clilck the "Custom Level..." button.  Change the value of User Authentication to "Automatic login with current username and password".
3) In the new IIS manager, ensure that the web application directory is both:
a) in the "Classic .NET AppPool".
b) has "Windows Authentication" enabled in the Authentication section.

After these steps I now have site development working against a local IIS7 server, and debugging is working just fine.  There is one last issue that is apparently a Vista RC1 issue without any workarounds.  When building solutions, I quite frequently get the error "Attempted to read or write protected memory. This is often an indication that other memory is corrupt.".  If this happens, the only fix is to restart the IDE.  Roll on Vista RTM install!

Microsoft released the beta of Windows Live Writer a couple of days ago.  I thought I would do the "corporate thing" and give it a go.  It looks really nice.

I have used a few different tools in the past to post to my blog.  BlogJet is an excellent tool, and let me do just what I wanted.  Windows Live Writer does look a little bit like BlogJet in places (particularly in the Category selector), but it has some great value-add features that I am enjoying.

My favourite one so far is the true WYSIWYG editing.  When you set up your account in the tool, it goes off and downloads the CSS and HTML for the blog to use at edit time.  Right now, I am writing this entry and the heading and fonts all look exactly right.  Even better, press Shift-F11 and it will preview your posting IN PLACE in a downloaded version of your real blog.  Nice.

It has some good photo publishing features, and a feature to insert a Live Local map inline in your blog entry.  Just like this one, showing where I am writing this posting!

 I set it up to work with both Spaces and dasBlog with very little effort, so it gets top marks there.

There is also an SDK available so that developers can add capabilities to publish additional content types.

A big thumbs up rating from me - give it a try!

There are two great pieces of utility software that I have purchased in the past 12 months – FolderShare and Onfolio.  I have blogged about FolderShare before, but I don’t think I have mentioned Onfolio.

Onfolio is a tool for collecting and organizing information; it integrates into your browser (IE and FireFox), into Outlook and has a standalone desktop application version.  You use it to create  “Collection” files.  These are single files that pull all of the clippings you make together into one place.  You can capture links, whole web pages, snippets of a page, images, PDFs, in fact any file you can drag and drop onto the treeview, and they are all then available offline.

I have been using Onfolio in conjunction with FolderShare for a while now to ensure that all of my “information”, the stuff I care about, is available to me at all of the computers I regularly use without me having to think about it.  Each machine has Onfolio installed, and I have my Collections folder shared using FolderShare across all of the machines.  So, when I find something useful that I want to keep, I clip it to Onfolio, and minutes later all of my other machines have that same data available.  Genius.

A little while ago, my employer (Microsoft) showed how much they agreed with my taste in utilities by buying the FolderShare company, and then making the software free to all.  Now they have done it again by buying Onfolio, and rolling the product into the new Windows Live Toolbar; they have also made this product free too.  Mildly annoying since I paid for Onfolio back last year, but great news that my favourite utilities are now both part of the Windows Live family of products.

You can download the Windows Live Toolbar beta here.

Ever taken what you thought was that perfect “family photo” only to develop it (or download it to your computer) to find Granny is grimacing, Uncle Joe looks like he has indigestion, baby Alice is looking the other way, your sister looks asleep or your mum looks wild eyed on some hallucinogenic drug?

For me, the idea behind the family group shot is almost always spoiled by the physical effect produced.  You want to capture that happy moment for all to treasure, to try and relay to the viewer the joy of the occasion.  Instead you get one (or maybe more!) scenes of sleeping, farting, spaced out grimacing.

Maybe you take 5 or 8 shots; surely Granny is getting close to a smile in ONE of them.  Baby Alice decides to grace you with her smile on a couple of pictures, but not the same ones as when Granny found her grin.  Mum and sister both sort their eyes out for the last picture, but fail on the rest.

That leaves you with EIGHT shots that all fail dismally to convey the core atmosphere you were trying to capture in the first place – a glorious record of the happy occasion.

Enter Microsoft Research’s “Group Shot”.

This software lets you take a number of “similar” photo’s, and later on select the best parts of each to merge into that single perfect shot.  You can highlight Granny’s smile, baby’s face, Mum and sister’s eyes, all in different versions of the shot.  Then the software will pull together a great faimly portrait you can be proud of.

Obviously I am only listing the one obvious use for this software, I am sure there are many more scenarios where this would be pretty useful.

I tried out an earlier internal copy of this and was quite impressed.  In a later post I will try and pull out some of my own photo’s and give an example of the results this software will produce.

I have posted a couple of times before about FolderShare, and it’s recent purchase by Microsoft.  I just wanted to add two comments:

1) it is now totally free.  I will be refunded a pro-rated amount for the remainder of my subscription year.  This is excellent news, and if you didn’t sign up already, then you no longer have an excuse not to do so.

2) they removed one of the best features – differential analysis of files prior to transfer.  Before the MSFT purchase, FolderShare would be very intelligent about how it transferred files, often only transferring the changed parts of the file to save download time.  As someone who has a number of 25Mb plus files and only a 512kbps DSL line at home, i have now gone back to “multiple minutes” of download time for each change to one of those files, instead of a couple of seconds.  Microsoft, please add this feature back in!

Mike Torres was asking how to integrate the Windows Desktop Search / MSN Search toolbar with the search on the new Windows Live homepage –  http://www.live.com/.

Well, I can help with that…

First, open up the Desktop Search options dialog (you can do this by right clicking the little magnifying glass tray icon and selecting Desktop Search Options).  On the General tab, there are options for the “Web search service”.  You need to switch your option from “MSN Search” to “Other search service” and then enter the URL http://www.live.com/?q=$w.

And you’re all set.

I have been using FolderShare for a while, and I love it.  I love it enough to shell out $99 a year for the premium service.  Turns out that Microsoft purchased FolderShare today.

This is great news in many respects – and as a Microsoft employee I hope I get to use the service for free now!    I hope also that partners such as Iomega can continue to support the FolderShare service natively in their hardware – being able to have “hot” backups of all of your files on a drive you can simply unplug and take with you if you need to is awesome. 

If you haven’t looked at FolderShare yet, you should.  It functions excellently as a way of backing up your data between many machines, as well as a really convenient way of just having your “stuff” ready to be used on whichever machine you happen to be working on.

The IE Developer Toolbar has been refreshed with some new features and bug fixes.

The details from the download page state:

This version of the Developer Toolbar is an updated version of Beta 1; it was updated on October 31, 2005. Several issues are resolved and some feedback has been incorporated.
-- Element bounding box calculations are more accurate.
-- Outlining of elements is now significantly faster.
-- The image report no longer crashes.
-- Installation no longer requires a reboot. (Beta 1 users will still be prompted to reboot because the current installer invokes the original uninstaller).
-- The minimize and maximize buttons now refresh after the "Resize" command.
-- The "Select element by click" bounding box is now more visible on pages with blue backgrounds.
-- The attributes editor (middle pane) now has variable width fields (for example, you can type beyond the width of the box).
-- Fixes for some pages that do not trigger OnDocumentComplete events.
-- Fixed the continuity of using "element" rather than "tag" in the menus.
-- The ruler is easier to use and to scroll.
-- Enabling/disabling images no longer restarts Internet Explorer.
-- The Resize menu now contains more resolutions.
-- Editing a property is now much less likely to let keystrokes "leak" back to IE and navigate without the user expecting it.
-- Trying to use the ruler while IE is in "folder mode" should no longer crash the browser.

New features and functionality have also been added.
-- Default styles (in the third pane) now appear in gray, separating them from explicit styles.
-- The ruler dialog is always populated with the ruler information if there is just one ruler.
-- The ruler dialog now describes advanced features.
-- "Undo all" reverts the page to the initial state.
-- You can now remove all outlines.

Enjoy!

Just found out from the IEBlog that Microsoft have released a beta of the IE Developer Toolbar.

It has some pretty nice features - you can view the HTML DOM of the current page, update attributes and styles of items on the page, toggle various useful pieces of info (such as image size, image path etc), and outline various types of element on the page.  You can also do single click validation of the page etc.

Most web developers will probably find something useful in there. 

Microsoft and Yahoo! have announced an agreement to connect their messenger products together.  This will mean that users will be able to include buddies from both the MSN and Yahoo! services in whichever of the two clients they prefer.

Check out the press release here.

I just arrived in Shanghai, here for a week on business.  I have only travelled East once before (to Thailand) so this is quite exciting!  Not much to report as yet, except that the taxi drivers are completely insane.  I am staying in the "world's highest hotel" which is pretty impressive.  Outside my room is the internal atrium that stretches 33 storeys below.  Looking over the bannister is NOT for the faint of heart!

Sorry about the quality of the picture - taken with my Smartphone.

My team at Microsoft put 3 new msn.com international homepages live last week that embrace AJAX technologies for page rendering.  These homepages (found at http://malaysia.msn.com and http://ch.msn.com) load their contents asynchronously, and allow real-time interaction with certain modules on the page.  Adding new weather cities and RSS feeds no longer requires a page reload, instead loading the data straight into the page.

The sites are in pilot mode right now, but we will be rolling out many more international version starting September.

Microsoft announced the official name for the next version of Windows, currently known as Longhorn.  Microsoft Vista.

Nice.  I like it.  It implies "the view outside of the window", the bigger picture.

Check out the press release and video here.