Inès' Crib

Now that InfoPath 2010 Beta is publicly available, we can start discussing various new and exciting features that we are releasing for Office 2010.

I have put together a video which describes how you can create and customize a SharePoint list and fields using InfoPath 2010:

Enjoy!

Ines

Long time no post! Yeah, it has been a couple of months, and the weekly updates didn't really stick . Anyways, better late than never!

• A coupe of months ago, I purchased a new TV: A 46 inches Samsung LCD!  It truly rocks!
• I have a new job! After 1.5 years of exciting working on the Messenger team, I am moving to Office as an SDE on the InfoPath team.  I am looking forward to contributing to the Office 14 release!
• Maybe our soccer team will have a winning record this season - keeping my fingers crossed .
• We had a crazy windstorm in Seattle a few weeks ago! My place was out of power for a whole week.  Thankfully, I was able to crash at my place for a night, Aaron's for another, Niladri's for another, building 36 for another... You get the idea. Thank you both for letting me crash!
• Game mania! Jerome acquired an XBox 360 and a Wii for himself, and a Play Station 3 for his brother. Needless to say, I have seen my share of Gears of Wars, Wii Sports, Halo 2, ...
• We expanded our circle of friends! Welcome Ayman, Luke, Navaz and Sarah.

Ok, that's enough ramblings. I may update this post later.

Happy Holidays everybody .

Peace Out!

• I finally hooked up the webcam I have in my office, and tried it out with our latest Messenger bits. I have to say I am impressed  I was able to "video chat" with my dad, my uncle, Chris, Nawaz... full screen. Good times  Props to Aleks, Raghu and everyone else who works on the Audio/Video team: it truly rocks! I am even considering purchasing a LifeCam (or just steal one of Alek's, who claims he has 3 in his office ).
• One of the Beta testers forwarded me this link about Live Cards. Definitely a great idea: you can, for free, order Windows Live Messenger themed business cards. You can include your IM adress, Spaces address, ... If I was still living in Europe, I would definitely order some!
• I may be way late on this one, but a great link to add to your RSS readers to keep up to date with Windows Live Blogs: http://msreadr.com/.
• I attended a very interesting class last week (perks of working at Microsoft = free training ), called "Design Patterns". It was even more interesting to meet up with devs from several different teams at Microsoft, and get their prespective on how to design software "well" - both for managed and unmanaged apps. Too bad it was only 2 days short. Anyways, I am eager to apply what I have learned .
• The project I have been working on since Sharing Folders is coming along pretty well. This is one of the first projects I have had to work on that involves coordinating with 5 different teams. Fun and chaotic at the same time, but coming along surely .
• As far as work stuff goes, I have wrapped up loose ends from last week, mainly adding some more code to our test client to finish up the last bits and pieces of functionality it was missing. It's pretty exciting to have everything in place now . These past couple of weeks have been really exciting: I can't remember the last time I designed and coded so much stuff back to back. Anyways, my upcoming tasks include doing security work on this project, and maybe starting work on another project that's kicking off. 
• WORLD CUP!!!! I can't believe France tied Switzerland . I even wore my Zidane shirt to work last week for good luck! Speaking of soccer, I made a bet with Josh that France would make it further than USA. Hopefully France will finish top 2 of its group, and US won't . How do I keep up with the World Cup while at work?
• The Microsoft Soccer Socreboard installed on my machines
• The RedWest Cafeteria: Props to Microsoft on this one! Our cafeteria in RedWest has a big screen projector hooked up to braodcast the World Cup games.
• Couple of fun events at work: we have an outing this Friday at a Billards place. Hopefully I can kick some butt at pool . There is also a Messenger 8.0 party next Thursday - not sure what or where yet.
• I have been playing in a soccer league with a few of my co-workers every Monday night. It's been a lot of fun, and is definitely helping my cardio! Hopefully, if it ever stops raining, I can hit the tennis courts this week and last more than 1/2 hr .

Anyways, that's about it for ramblings...

Peace Out!

It has been a while since I posted on here! Time flies by when you are busy I guess . Well, let's do a quick run down of passed/upcoming life things, just so I can say I blogged something

• A couple of weeks ago, the guys from LiveSide came to visit. It was great meeting Chris, Harrison, and Kip (sorry I missed you Brandon L!). It also gave me the opportunity to meet up with other Bloggers. Definitely good times, and I am looking forward to their next visit 
• Messenger 8.0 is almost out, you could say it's basically sticking its nose out of the door (feels like we have shipped so many Betas ). This will be the first product I have shipped at Microsoft! Go SHARING!
• Speaking of firsts: my 1 year anniversaty at Microsoft is coming up -> 06/06/06. How freaky is that!  I will be bringing 1 pound of M&Ms at work... or mabye Skittles...
• For the past couple of weeks, I have slowly moved away from Sharing Folders work and started working on another project: let's call it project X. It has definitely been a lot of fun, especially since I am coding a lot more stuff than on sDrive (and of course, I just finished up a test client app for project X, just because I love to slap .Net UIs on top of everything ). Another great thing about this project is the number of teams involved: A LOT! It may lead to confusions at times, but on the plus side, it is great to interact and meet individuals from other teams. And it is always a plus to learn about new projects and technologies at the same time.
• On a personal note, life's been filled with activities:
• I recently watched MI III, X-Men III, Da Vinci Code... Decent flicks.
• I went to watch the Cirque Du Soleil. That was definitely interesting: I don't think I am too much of an "artsy" type.
• I started playing tennis again! The weather's been great, and I have found a few good people to hit with.
• I attended my first Women's Basketball Game. Now that was AWESOME! I am now officially a STORMS fan and will be attending more games this summer.
• A few morale events at work, that included a BBQ at Marty's house, Box Seats at the Mariners game, and a really fun and entertaining Putt Putt game.
• I hosted a really last minute "Cook-In" party for Memorial Day: not bad of a turn out though, and I even bought balloons.

Anyways, enough rambling... I am looking forward to the summer, hopefully it will bring nice and sunny weather!

I will try to post more frequent updates.

Peace Out!

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.
  

• We traded in our CRTs for LCDs at work. The really nice DELL ones that flip in all directions. WOHOO
• Must be Christmas or something, because we also received Windows Live Skylight Team shirts.
• A wind storm hit the Seattle area, and knocked out trees, power, cars and more on its way.
• Jerome made me COUSCOUS!!!
• We are having a Super Bowl party tomorrow. Go SEAHAWKS! Turns out a Quebecois plays for the Seahawks, so I have someone to cheer for. Go JP!

I have uploaded some pics for your viewing pleasure.

Peace Out!

• 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!