I heard the rumours, but this seems to have sealed it –
employees at MSFT basically “own” blocks of code for themselves.

http://blogs.msdn.com/michkap/archive/2005/06/22/431394.aspx

Its not that I disagree with the policy, and in fact I’m
a de-factor owner of entire modules at my current
place of work, but owning a few API’s seems funny – I guess
when we’re talking on the scale of Windows, you’d need to have incredibly
fine granularity of code ownership – the worst thing would be for a bug
to arise in a block of code, and for no one to know what it does or who should fix
it.

Just interesting to think….

Eran Sandler has just started blogging….He’s a
pro when it comes to debugging using native-low level debuggers and always has
lots of interesting stuff to say.

Read Here!

This
article over at MSDN discusses the design, architecture and implementation
of the Bungie.NET website. It’s really quite interesting to read how they
leveraged .NET and other technologies to create such a successful site.

(Taken from article)

Summary: The Bungie.net
site is the online companion to the wildly successful Halo 2 video game for
Xbox, released in November 2004 by Microsoft. The site also acts as the
community hub for all things related to Bungie games. Built with the Microsoft
..NET Framework, Bungie.net serves up more than 4 million pages per day,
accumulating 300 gigabytes of online game statistics per month from more than 1
million games played daily. Deemed "Most Innovative Design" by IGN
Entertainment in 2004, the site provides innovative ways for users to view game
statistics and details as well as interact with each other through forums and
team Web pages. The release of the Bungie.net site represented a milestone in
online console game play. This case study provides insight into this
accomplishment.

Yeap….In what has been dubbed the “Blue
Hat” conference in US, Microsoft invited several security researches to
demonstrate various aspects of Windows being compromised, in an attempt to show
that the company is serious about squashing security holes…

Very interesting to read….

I come from a background of Delphi development, and came
across this article by Steve Trefethen about The Delphi
R&D Development Process…

Interesting to note that the Delphi IDE builds in only 20
mins….Even more interesting is the fact that all of borland’s tools
(both internal and some external) are written in Delphi…..Hopefully one
day they’ll fix up the Delphi product line and make the IDE actually functional
and productive….compared to VS.NET, unfortunately Borland have a long way
to go just yet…

Tell them to do some research on the “asynchronous
network analysis layer protocol based engine” (aka ANALPROBE)

…In what I hope will be a long line of posts :P

I think its safe to say that its now officially full-steam
ahead.

-x