Jarrett House NorthSecond verse, same as the first.

On the Veracode blog (where I now post from time to time), we had a retrospective on the Microsoft Trustworthy Computing memo, which had its ten year anniversary on the 15th. The retrospective spanned two posts and I’m quoted in the second: On January 15, 2002, I was in business school and had just accepted [...]

The developer challenge in developing secure code is two-pronged: first, understanding the threat landscape; second, coding defensively and following best practices to avoid creating security vulnerabilities in code. The WCF Security Guide, now available for download from Microsoft, is a pretty impressive document (600+ pages) that combines aspects of both threat landscape definition and specific [...]

I posted a quick link to an article about Microsoft’s new BrowseRank search technology a few days ago. Here’s why the paper is informative, why I think BrowseRank is an interesting technology for improving search, and why I think it’s doomed as a general-purpose basis for building relevance data for the web. Informative: This paper [...]

Things you can’t do with Outlook 2007: assign custom keyboard shortcuts to Ribbon items. This is annoying if you have certain keyboard shortcuts hardwired. For instance, in Outlook 2003 (and Word) one could access the “Paste Special” command (which gives a number of optional formats in which content can be pasted into a document, including [...]

Yesterday I posted a quick link (last entry) to one of the epic Billg emails that somehow became evidence in the Microsoft antitrust trial. The mail was sent in January 2003, when I was working in the marketing group that was responsible for Microsoft.com, which was one of the groups implicated in the email about [...]

Broiled lobster: James Hook & Co. goes up in flames Aw crap. Well, it’s a good thing that George & Becky bought those lobsters last week. But, on a very silly note: on hearing that 60,000 pounds of lobster were in a fire, I find myself wondering: is there enough butter in all of Boston? [...]

A while ago I posted a few things that I found about implementing the GTD methodology with Outlook. Since I recently changed jobs, I’ve had an opportunity to carry some of the best practices forward as well as start from ground zero (a true Inbox Zero!) in some other areas. Here’s a quick roundup of [...]

A follow up to my earlier note about tags and Microsoft Outlook: I am happy to say that Taglocity has changed my life. I used to have folders in folders in folders and dealing with any received mail was torture. Now I’ve implemented tags and my workflow has totally changed. I used to deal only [...]

I am an email junkie. There, I said it. So the question is, what to do about it? I have two problems with my work email (home is a story for a different day). First, I tend to save every message that isn’t outright spam or one-word answers—and it’s only recently that I started deleting [...]

The Windows Presentation Foundation of Microsoft’s .NET Framework 3.0 gives you a lot of bang for the buck—for instance, it includes a free spell checker. Unfortunately, you sometimes get what you pay for. There is no ability to add a custom dictionary in the current version of the spellchecker. There also appears to be no [...]

(Warning: technical post ahead.) Ever since leaving the PowerBuilder/Sybase/ERWin world behind, something I’ve missed is the ability to easily generate portable SQL scripts for populating a table with test data. There are plenty of solutions in SQL Server for migrating data—DTS/Integration Services, BCP, and others. But DTS and Integration Services have to be maintained in [...]

Following up on my earlier post about built in system services sucking CPU: when we last left the story I had disabled the Offline Files service, better known as CSCService, as a likely candidate for my regular out-of-resources situation. Four days later, it looks clear that CSCService is the culprit. I have had no resource [...]

Who knew: the Microsoft gym towel flap turned into a real turnaround in Microsoft HR. Microsoft screws up an Office Online feature launch by simulshipping it with an announcement of a delay in the Mac version of Office. How can Microsoft be surprised at the reaction that got?

My previous exploration of Vista service packs and hotfixes led nowhere close to fixing my Vista issues. I was a little dejected for a while. But now I may have something to go on. Excel 2007 just locked up on me today, as did Outlook. Recognizing the symptoms of an incipient total freeze-up of the [...]

I keep telling the engineers who work with me that once we ship, we’ll have to write some articles with all the tips and tricks that we’ve discovered in Microsoft’s .NET Framework v.3, specifically WPF and WCF. The technology is easy enough to use, as I’ve written before, that even a product manager can do [...]