In an attempt to Blog more, I am thinking of starting "Weekly Rambles" post, to sparsingly cover random bits and pieces of news .

• You didn't get an invite to use Messenger Beta? You can now directly sign up, sign in and start trying the build out. Give Sharing Folders a try .
• I have to write up the blog entry I will be posting on Wednesday on our Team Blog. I need to come up with good questions ...
• Event Tracing for Windows: I recently wrote up a small C# wrapper on top of a C++ DLL (PInvok'ing is hard to debug but works surprisingly well ) that allows controling and consuming ETW events from Messenger. It's fairly straighforward, light weight, and gives you the ability to easily monitor performance for any of the events Messenger provides. And it's fairly standard, so there are tons of tools out there for ETW.
• I have received a few "bugs" these past couple of days from Beta Testers/Customers, that I have passed along internally to get fixed. Thanks for sending them my way and improving the Messenger build. Keep them coming (ines_khelifi@hotmail.com) .
• Sharing Folders (feature I work on) are progressing really well. The customer feedback has been positive, and we are working on ironing out the remaining issues to make it even better.
• Windows Live Developer Center: Dev-Centric website for the Windows Live Platform. Great initiative!  Hopefully more content will be added to the Messenger section (currently only touches on the Activities API ).
  
• I should be starting to work on a new project fairly soon. I love new things!
• The Mix 06 conference is underway. Interesting point brought up by Bill Gates at the keynote, when asked about his thoughts on release schedules, and whether MS would consider monthly updates (or something to that extent ):
• To summarize his answer/opinion in my own words: "Yes and No. The Kernel won't upgrade monthly, neither will SQL Server: those products need to be tested, tested, tested and tested some more before releasing to customers. But if you take Live Services, such as Messenger, testing it in house before getting it out to customers isn't as critical. Delivering fast is what's good/beneficial for that type of product..."
• I would tend to agree, as I could definitely see Messenger shipping monthly updates (and drive every tester nuts ). But in all seriousness, given enough SQM data points, Watson data recording, Log Gathering, Beta Testers participation... it would definitely be possible to increase ship time and cut down "test time" quite a bit.
• This remind me of my Eclipse days, where we (developers) basically coded up the features, wrote the unit tests, did the basic the testing, and released the builds to customers who would report issues that we would fix. Of course, Eclipse is a more "self-contained" product and has less external dependencies, which makes a bit simpler to test and verify.

That's all for now! Let's see if I can keep up with this "Blogging Weekly" streak I am on .

Peace Out!

Today at work, I participated in the Windows Live Messenger Beta Chat for about an hour or so. It's a great opportunity to interact with the Beta testers and answer a few questions here and there. Unfortunately, I have had to answer a lot of the testers' questions with: "wow that would be a nice feature to have", or "stay tuned for more on this in upcoming releases". It is a bit frustrating not to be able to talk about all the exciting work undergoing on the team right now, but it is definitely understandable!

One of the main issues brought up to my attention in the past couple days by some users is the lack of features/new content as builds after builds are released. The team has made a conscious effort to work on quality at this stage, so I believe that this "lack of new features - (sidenote: I thought we were shippings lots of features since 7.5, but that's just me )" is greatly worth it (I prefer stable to more features). It's a bit of a chicken in the egg problem if you ask me: given a short time span, less features + easier to ensure quality VS more features + harder to ensure quality. Obviously, the ability to combine both would be great. But shipping software "fast" is hard. It's the nature of the beast: everyone wants to be "first to market", so everyone pushes, pushes and pushes some more!

Since I started working on the Messenger team 9 months ago, I have witnessed the release of Messenger 7.5 Final (Aug), November Beta Release (Nov), February Beta Release (Feb), and many more to come... You do the math: 3 releases in 9 months. I calculated that at this pace, by this time next year, my "ship number" may be up to 4 "final released features/products". It's a bit crazy if you ask me!

What few people realize is that it's not just about developers writing solid code. Some may think that if developers wrote perfect code all the time, we would all ship quality products on time with tons of features that would require little test . The problem, however, is that when you are shipping software that will run on millions of different PCs, through millions of different networks, interacting with hundreds of thousands of components inside Windows and 3rd parties... you create the testing problem!

Anyways, the morale of the story: quality VS quantity, it's hard to please everybody!

• New user experience
• Tabbed pages (brilliant )
  
• A fair number of new Gadgets
  
• Ability to browse gadgets and add them easily through the Gadget Gallery
• Faster loading/rendering of pages (go AJAX!)
  
• Firefox Support! I am using Firefox right now, and live.com seems to be rendering things nicely so far.
• Search
• Fancy scroll bar that lets you navigate through results faster! Bye bye "Next" and "Prev" links
• Slider to control amount of information displayed for search results
• Site search
• Revamped image search
• Feed viewer for "Feed" results
• Search Macros
  
• And way way more... The above is just what I discovered through 5 minutes of playing around with it.
  

• How to juggle a million work items at once.
• Managing the insane amount of emails and meeting requests that come in to my Inbox daily.
• Shipping software on short timelines!
• Finally understanding the crazy amount of terms thrown around at work: EOD, EOW, ZBB, UI Freeze, wack wack (still my favorite!)...
• And the list goes on and on and on..

Tips and Tricks for WLM 8, courtesy of Chris.

And Merry Christmas (<instert alternative Holiday YOU celebrate here>) everybody .

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Some WLM Beta tips and tricks

Ok here's some of the small things you might have missed that I hope will make your Messenger 8 experience that little bit better :)

 

With the contact list selected:

• Typing any character will cause the wordwheel feature to become active. So if you want to search for a contact, don't bother clicking the word wheel box, just start typing!
• Press "Alt S" to load your Shared Folders.
• Press "Alt M" to load your Inbox.

With a conversation window selected:

• If you want to hide/show display pictures in the conversation window, click the "To: Name Here <emailaddress@here>" bar at the top of the window
• If you have borderless mode enabled, remember you can press the Alt key to temporarily show the menus.
• If you want to share a file but want the recipient to receive it instantly (ie miss out the turn-based queue system)  just drag the file into the text entry part of the conversation window and choose the option "Send the file through direct file transfer."
• In the conversation window, the keyboard shortcut "Alt N" now sends a nudge instead of loading the My Winks panel. That can now be loaded by "Alt W" :)
• The keyboard shorcut "Alt U" does not now start an audio conversation because of the new Windows Live Call integration. Use "Alt C C" for a Voice conversation.
• The keyboard shorcut "Alt O" does not now change your font but instead starts a Video conversation (changed from 7.0 to 7.5)

As always, this is only a beta, so the shortcut are subject to change.

I haven't had much time to Blog lately: it has been pretty busy at work. I guess it never lets down at MSN!

1. Blog About Messenger: Blog about Messenger and trackback to this post.
2. Blog About Sharing Folders: If you receive a Beta invite, you promise to try out  the "Sharing Folders" feature and Blog about it, in good and/or in bad . 

UPDATE: I just sent out my last batch of available invites, so donations are officially (really) closed. Enjoy the Beta and be sure to send your feedback!

- Microsoft Platform Products & Services Division: Windows, Server and Tools, and MSN. Headed by Kevin Johnson and Allchin, as divisional co-presidents, until Allchin's retirement.
- Microsoft Business Division: Information Worker (Office) and Microsoft Business Solutions: Headed by Jeff Raikes as president.
- Microsoft Entertainment & Devices Division: Home & Entertainment Division and Mobile & Embedded Devices Division: Headed by Robbie Bach as divisional president.

WOHOO, it's LIVE .

I haven't had time to download the SDK and take a look at this. Someone, please download it and post a code snippet, or a summary of the API, or something! Thanks in advance

UPDATE: This link is now up. Great outlet to obtain help and discuss API issues. 

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MSN Messenger Activity SDK

 

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=3656f4de-1db2-4f6c-b278-abb1c5ca5934&DisplayLang=en

 

Enjoy!

 

(Thanks to Timothy @ mess.be)