Sometimes I wonder... Other times I know.
Thursday, April 28, 2005
 
U2!
Madhur & I went and checked out U2 at Key Arena. Definitely an incredible concert... the set list was as follows:

City Of Blinding Lights, Beautiful Day, Vertigo, Elevation, Gloria, The Ocean, New Year's Day, Miracle Drug, Sometimes You Can't Make It On Your Own, Love And Peace Or Else, Sunday Bloody Sunday, Bullet The Blue Sky / The Hands That Built America (snippet) / When Johnny Comes Marching Home (snippet), Running To Stand Still, Bad / Norwegian Wood (snippet) / Ruby Tuesday (snippet), Pride (In The Name Of Love), Where The Streets Have No Name, One
Encore: Zoo Station, The Fly, Mysterious Ways, All Because Of You, Original Of The Species, Vertigo

I just found "The Meaning of U2 Lyrics"... a site where U2 fans give their opinions on the significance of each song and offer fairly insightful interpretations.

Quite often, people with an analytical disposition (which comprises a majority of the software and hardware industry) will discard the possibility of hidden significance in various pieces of art. I think about it this way: Consider the time spent designing and thinking through programming models, UIs, languages, etc etc... do you think artists spend any less time designing their art? (think: The Matrix trilogy) Of course there will be examples where "a cigar is just a cigar", but both good software and art are usually consequences of some careful design.

- posted by # posted by Dennis Pilarinos : 10:53 PM 0 comments  
Friday, April 22, 2005
 
Its beginning to feel a lot like... summer!
Ori & I hung out today and took pictures of our babys...
This has to be one of my favorite pictures..

- posted by # posted by Dennis Pilarinos : 12:14 AM 0 comments  
Thursday, April 21, 2005
 
Mr Sells comes to town....
I brielfy met Chris Sells today while he was waiting for Dharma. Chris is a well respected author and a .NET "rockstar"... he's recently joined a development team within Microsoft. I'm looking forward to working with him in the future as he's extremely knowledgeable and just a nice guy :)

- posted by # posted by Dennis Pilarinos : 1:05 AM 0 comments  
Sunday, April 17, 2005
 
Lilian is in China...
Wow, I'm jealous. Read her blog and check out what she's been up to...

- posted by # posted by Dennis Pilarinos : 10:56 AM 0 comments  
 
Office life recap: Dev kitchen is finished.. PDC in full swing
The Dev Kitchen that I mentioned in an earlier post is now complete. I spent most of my working hours last week watching developers play with our technology and as lots of interesting and hard questions.

I was buddied with a our 'target' skill set of developers who were able to accomplish their scenario quite quickly... not without pain though. We received some very good feedback on our programming model, now its just trying to figure out how we're able to incorporate it given our tight schedule.

The other 15% of my time was focused on nailing down the PDC keynote demo with a variety of other technologies including Infocard.

I bumped into Robert again and we're thinking of doing a "behind the keynote" on Channel9.

- posted by # posted by Dennis Pilarinos : 10:46 AM 0 comments  
Thursday, April 14, 2005
 
Ouch....
I feel bad for this guy... yet another CarreraGT bites the dust.

- posted by # posted by Dennis Pilarinos : 10:39 PM 0 comments  
Sunday, April 10, 2005
 
www.dennispi.com now online
... but still needs a lot of work. I'll be consolidating my online photo album and blog onto this site.

- posted by # posted by Dennis Pilarinos : 12:08 PM 2 comments  
 
Weekend Update
Garbage, one of my favorite bands, was supposed to put on a show on Friday night. Unfortunately, some of the band members fell ill and had to cancel the show.... kind of a let down, but better than a subpar performance.

A few friends & I ate at DragonFish, a chinese/fusion restaurant just down the street from the Paramount (where Garbage would have played). I highly recommend it.

Our technology is going through a bit of churn as a result of an internal review process. I played with the new APIs and I think they are starting to feel a bit better. Tomorrow morning we sit down with developers from 5-6 companies who will be spending 4 days in a 'dev kitchen' building solutions with our bits. Should be interesting!

- posted by # posted by Dennis Pilarinos : 11:53 AM 1 comments  
Wednesday, April 06, 2005
 
The "how would I know..." Principle
As part of creating a new platform targeted towards developers, we are often balancing the trade-offs between exposing a part of a programming model (say, in a template), versus, hiding the code and hoping the developer is able to figure out how to get to it and use it.

The former has the disadvantage of potentially 'scaring' a first time user of the code off by overwhelming the developer with all the different 'knobs' that are available to tweak.

The latter, means hiding away the knobs and potentially frustrating the developer who wants those knobs.

Which leaves me to wonder... if we hide the knobs... I often imagine the developer asking "how the (the insert expletives) would I know..."

Let me give you a concrete example: Ever notice the "Designer Generated Region" code in your Winforms projects? That's the chunk of code that the WinForms team didn't necessarily think it'd be valuable to expose, but, yet, they still make it available in a hidden region.

I think the design choice should be made along the following principle: show the developer what is going to be the most used. Show them the part of the model that they'll want to tweak with immediately. Of course.. what part would those be?

Usability tests will help figure those 'knobs' out... intuition over time will kick in too. Regardless, its always a subjective and as such, a contentious discussion.

David Campbell gives a great talk on these knobs as it applied to SQL Server. I just wonder what knobs we should or shouldn't have exposed.

- posted by # posted by Dennis Pilarinos : 10:58 PM 0 comments  
Saturday, April 02, 2005
 
Winforms/Webforms developers..
A lot of the programming model design decisions our team has taken made is targeted towards making the winforms/webforms developers like its an extension of what they're familiar with. However, I'm sure there must be some issues that these developers wish never existed in those technologies.

My question is simple: if you were able to go back in time and work on either technology from the beginning, what would you change? What part(s) of the model do you think are overly complicated?

I've looked for other bloggers entries on this subject with to no avail, please feel free to send me links!

- posted by # posted by Dennis Pilarinos : 8:20 AM 0 comments