Brian H. Prince

PSR stands for Problem Step Recorder, and is a tool that ships in Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2. It was designed to help support professionals have users record the steps of their problem so they can see what is going on. It fixes the ‘See the big blue ball in the lower left-hand corner?’ problem. While we have remote connection capabilities, and screen recorders, those can be hard to setup for a typical user, and takes too long to show something simple. PSR is really lightweight and helps with the initial triaging of the problem. And let’s face it, if you are reading this you are probably the IT Support team for your family. You are probably feeling a lot of angst about the upcoming holidays, especially Thanksgiving, which is the one holiday you are forced to hang around with people you actively avoid on Twitter and Facebook. You are not alone, we all feel like this. In the 50’s it was everyone asking the family member who was a physician about medical questions all day. Now ...

I have a lot of friends who really like to work in Python and Ruby, so I thought I would pass this announcement on. If you are into Python and Ruby, you might want to check out www.codemash.org , a great event I help with coming up in January. Today we announced the release of the IronRuby and IronPython CTPs for .NET 4.0 Beta 2 . This is the third preview of IronRuby and IronPython running under the Dynamic Language Runtime that is built directly into .NET 4.0. As before, this release allows you to use IronRuby objects and types as .NET 4.0 dynamic objects from within C# and Visual Basic code. These binaries are roughly equivalent to the functionality found in IronRuby 0.9 and IronPython 2.6. Take a look at Harry Pierson ’s blog post about this release as well, especially if you’re more into snakes than gemstones.   Try it out To try out this release: · Install NET 4.0 Beta 2 or Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 · Download either IronRuby or IronPython · Follow any of the...

Stephen Toub is on the Parallel Computing Platform team at Microsoft. Jennifer has convinced him to spend a week on the road in Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee, speaking to customers and visiting user groups. See her blog for more details on the tour. He will cover concurrency and tools for how to easily develop parallel solutions. This will be an important part of the framework going forward because of the many core problem. As the number of cores in CPUs increase, we will start to have issues with concurrency. We will also want to write code that leverages that hardware. BUT, writing multithreaded code is very difficult, and is insanely hard to debug. Microsoft’s challenge is to provide a framework as part of the platform to make it easy for developers to build parallel applications, with a great degree of quality and productivity. The official abstract and bio is below.  Date/time Location Registration Mon 10/26, 9-11am Microsoft office 2555 M...

Steve Guggenheimer announced the release dates of Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 at Computex 2009 in Tapei. We will be RTM’ing Windows 7 in the second half of July, with general availability (that means it’s in stores, etc.) by October 22nd. Windows Server 2008 R2 will be available at the same time. This is awesome news! Warm up your download tools, it’s not far away. Everyone I know has been impressed with, and really likes Windows 7, even some of the most critical people I know. I think this is due to the changes in how the Windows team developed the OS, as well as how open they were to feedback, and their willingness to make changes. If you weren’t reading the Engineering Windows 7 blog, you should go there now, and read all of the posts. They are all quite fascinating. I got to be part of the IQ team, which is a very small part, but it was still fun. I would be given weekly builds to install on my machines, and to test out. While the Beta was of a very high quality, fo...

nPlus1.org is on a hunt for a new look. The site has really taken off over the past six months, and they are ready for a facelift. Go design a new look, and submit it. First prize is $250 to Best Buy and a copy of Vista Ultimate. There are other prizes as well. Their site is built on Graffiti CMS, and you will need to either provide a template, or other materials to easily upgrade the site. Take a look at the official rules and requirements at http://nplus1.org/faceliftcontest/ .

Dave was hanging around the awesome CodeMash event this January, when he asked to interview me for his blogged. So we snuck out to the entryway of the Kalahari, and chatted about my experience at being a new employee of Microsoft. He had good timing in publishing the video, since this past Wednesday was my one year anniversary as a blue badge. Go check it out. http://www.davidgiard.com/2009/02/23/BrianPrinceOnWorkingForMicrosoft.aspx

I have always wanted to be able to just speak into my phone to store simple reminders. There is the voice note application built in, but it just doesn’t work smoothly for me. And you end up with all of these .wav files all over the place. There is 'jott' , where you call a number to save your reminder. They turn it into text, and send it to your inbox. I tried it a few years ago, but I never really fell in love it. While these two mechanisms work ok, they both make retrieval difficult once you have built up a fair amount of recordings. Microsoft Research has released a CTP of some technology they have been developing. Recite is a Windows Mobile application. You simply click “Remember” to record all of your reminders. Click “Search” to ask your notes a question. Recite figures out what you are asking, and finds the related recorded note. Watch the video below, and get all of the latest information at http://recite.microsoft.com . Just thinking about how they have to sear...

This is how you can score an easy $5,000. Think up, design, and build an awesome game in Silverlight. Just submit it to the Server Quest II contest site. Then get all of your friends and family to vote for it. The game with the most votes wins some awesome cash. The deadline is 78 days from now, so go get cracking. The website has a cool trailer, done in the 16bit graphics style of yore. Really funny stuff. But your game can be on anything, it doesn’t have to sync up with the Server Quest plot. Video: Server Quest Trailer How about a package delivery and retrieval simulator, that is multiplayer, and allows you to collect equipment, cash, and friends? Call it FedCraft. Or a real time strategy game that is centered around giant configurable robots doign battle with a background story about different clans competing for a diminishing pool of critical resources. Call it WreckWarrior. Perhaps a puzzle game that tracks progress in a community leader board way mixed with a bureauc...

Yes, that's right, on the iPhone. Not only there, but on the Wii and the Android phone as well. Side note: I got to look at an Android phone at CodeMash. It was ok. It felt heavy for it’s size. The UI was confusing for me, but the GMail interface was very strong. Anyway, I was browsing ArsTechnica this morning and came across this article, “ Open source Mono framework brings C# to iPhone and Wii ”. What really piqued my interest was because I just got back from CodeMash, where we had an iPhone development workshop. In it Ryan Paul discusses how developers have been getting around Apple’s restrictive policies on not allowing interpreted and runtime based platforms on the iPhone. If that isn’t directly aimed at .NET, Java, and other really popular languages right now, I don’t know what is. It seems that people are using Mono (from Novell, the brain child of Miguel de Icaza) to generate binaries. Mono provides the ability to skip CIL in the compilation process, and go stra...

The Renaissance was a period of rebirth in Europe during the 14th to 17th centuries. It was hundreds of years of revolution in the arts and in culture. The social patterns, thinking and technology that allowed this to happen took thousands of years to develop. It sparked a new passion in learning, new techniques and styles of painting, and widespread reform.  This lead to an amazing leap in science and technology and the definition of the scientific method, heralding the ‘Modern Age’. This ultimately led to a change in human society so grand, that we still talk about it today. Many of the world’s best achievements and treasures come form this period of time. I think the past few years, and the technologies coming out today, represent the leading edge of Renaissance 2.0. And since we are all geeks, we will of course shorten it to Ren2.0. Today, with cloud services, Azure, software plus services patterns, modern testing, SOAP/REST, Geneva, platforms like Mesh, and everything el...

The PDC is next week, and it is going to be huge. The amount and scale of the announcements are, in my view, the biggest of any PDC in the past (can’t say for future PDCs). Two of the keynotes by Ray Ozzie will be streamed live. The other keynotes will be available online shortly after they are completed. Since the PDC is on the west coast, this puts the keynotes during lunchtime in the EST time zone. The keynotes will contain all of the big announcements, and the great demos. They will give you an idea for the flavor of what the sessions are going to deep dive into. So here is how to throw a PDC viewing party. 0. Reserve a conference room of some sort. You will need a projector, speakers, and a computer to stream from. The speakers are optional, if everyone in your part can read lips. 1. Invite everyone you know. Invite people you don’t know. Tweet about it. Try not to break any stalking laws though. 2. Either convince your boss to pay for pizza for everyone, or tell th...

Everyone is excited about PDC2008. Go register if you haven’t yet. See your local user group leader for a $200 off discount code! The biggest announcement so far is that each attendee will receive a 160 GB USB hard drive, with all the bits on it, include a pre-beta release of Windows 7! We will also be revealing our cloud platform,  as well as details on .NET 4 and Visual Studio 2010. To celebrate, Channel8 just published this video, of the marketing team putting together some promos for PDC. Watch to the end to see the twist. PDC 2008 is coming... and I can't wait!

I was speaking a while ago at ITT in Nashville, TN. After my talk, several students came up to tell me about a site they were running called FlameGoat.net . The voice of the site is intended to be a little on the edge, with a ‘fight the power’ type tone. The site is interesting, with a lot of gaming news and trailers. They have started sections aimed at developers, with room to post videos and tutorials. These students were clearly self starters, taking their idea, and executing it, instead of just talking about it. The other great thing, is that 15%-25% of the ad revenue is donated to Saint Jude’s Children Hospital every month. Not only did they execute their idea, they are using it to help the community. That’s just awesome. As I look at my career, and the people I have known, I remember seeing some great idea, and thinking that I had the same idea, but never did it. I slowly learned that many times you can’t wait for someone else to let you do something, you just need to find ...

I am in post production at the moment on a video I am hoping will be accepted as an Arcast episode. This is my first significant video editing experience, so I have had a lot of hurdles, and challenges to figure out. But this post isn’t about the horrible state of video editing software in the world right now (how anyone expects a normal consumer to do any of this is beyond me!). I had a spare clip that was shot while we were doing a sound test. Jim Holmes and Philip Jordan just started gabbing. I thought this would be a good excuse to try out Silverlight streaming (while waiting 5.5 hours for the real video to render). What is Silverlight Streaming? It is a new service off of live.com. You can go to http://silverlight.live.com to get all of the official details. Microsoft gives you up to 10GB of storage space, and up to 5TB of bandwidth! You simply login, and create an account. Once you have an account, you can upload videos or music for online storage. You will be given a...

Let's face it, we have all dreamed of programming robots to do cool things, like fetch batteries for our wireless mice, pick up that stray d20 that fell under the table, or just to chase cats around the scale model Lego Death Star. There have been several games over the years that I have played (on almost every platform) that had a variation on this theme. One, on the Apple IIe, had you wiring together logic circuits and sensors to make the robot solve a challenge in a room (navigate force fields for example). Microsoft is starting a new competition that taps into this endless pool of hope we all have (still waiting for the flying cars!). RoboChamps.com . There will be a series of challenges over the next few months, with contestant rules and everything. You compete by using the MS Robotics Developer Studio, and a challenge kit. You program the robot to complete the goals in the challenge. The robot you program is a simulation of a real robot, as well as the environment. The ...

Jeff Blankenburg and I have been dog-fooding a new platform called Windows Live Mesh for the past month or two. On the surface, it just looks like another cool Web 2.0 application with some Software + Services architecture for fun. But Live Mesh is leveraging two big trends we have all seen in our lives. The explosion of the web's role in our lives, and the vast array of digital devices we have. Many of these new devices can access the Internet (cell phones and cameras), or are network aware. Can you imagine what the Apollo program might have looked liked with today's technology? I was talking to a friend that has a new phone, and he is trying to get all of his contacts (how many places do you store contacts?) synchronized everywhere, and easily accessible wherever he is. How many computers do you work on throughout the day, and forget something on the other? See some sample screen shots, and read the official announcement at Introducing Live Mesh . Our lives are f...

Microsoft has done it again. Having shipped an updated version of WCF, we have now released a new version of SOAP. I like this version a lot better, it is lighter weight, and is much faster. Also comes with a great Silverlight video interface. Stay to the end to see how to make your own SOAP.     Check out http://preview.microsoft.com/video to see more!