Today I offered to buy our Dev and Test teams a Starbucks . Little did I know they’d take my suggestion of a “ Iced Single Vente, 7 pump Peppermint, Caramel Sauce Top and Bottom, Light Ice, No whip, Mocha ” seriously! What I ended up with was 28 completely different drinks. It took me 15 minutes to order them and created a twenty person queue behind me. I’ve always wanted to order one of those silly complicated drinks people order, having order 28 today I’ve had my fix.
Hotmail’s getting a bit of press recently, both TechCrunch and Cnet posted articles today. It’s always nice to see some positive press about something you've been working on for over two years. I also got to see first hand some of the Ads we’ve started to run in Seattle last week. Just as I got back to SeaTac I also heard the radio ad.
In February I moved over to the Hotmail team and along with owning Mobile Hotmail & Calendar, I’m also the project manager for the entire Hotmail UI team. So it’s exciting to see our first milestone start to get deployed, just as we start coding our second. Here’s a repost of the blog posted on Live Wire made earlier today.
It amazes me how creative some of my colleagues are. Last Friday we had an Art Exhibition for everyone working on Windows Live ( Hotmail and Calendar ), down in Silicon Valley. I entered five photos, making a total of 37 pieces entered by the team. Everyone was allowed three votes and the winners announced at the end of the day.
I’m always up for learning something new and when it comes to development the best way for me is to add a new feature on tassography.com. That’s why the site is packed full of features, half of which I’m sure only I know about! Silverlight has been usable for about 18 months now and it was time I finally played around with it. Over Christmas I pulled together two simple applications that I think are pretty cool.
In my last posting I talked about how Windows Live Photo Gallery (WLPG) stores People tags in XMP. In this post I’m going to extend the Windows Imaging Component code from Robert Wlodarczyk’s Blog to read the data. The code is pretty simple to use, just make sure you have PresentationCore registered in your project and the System.Windows.Media.Imaging namespace.
Since writing Tassography.com tags have been an important part of my workflow. For as long as I can remember I have been using Microsoft’s Digital Image Pro 2006. With the release of the new version of Windows Live Photo Gallery (WLPG), I took this Christmas the time to switch over and take advantage of some of the cool new features. The most compelling new feature for me is the new people tagging capabilities.
Ok so I work for Hotmail, and this might sound me I’ve been drinking the company kool-aid but hear me out. If you’re using Gmail or Yahoo! then you can also tune out now, I’ll tackle that conversation for another day! But if you’re using a random ISP and you have your own domain name then read on. When I joined 8 months ago I was using an ISP that gave me POP3, IMAP and Web access to my email, that’s pretty good.
For the last two months, I’ve been the Lead Program Manager for Windows Live Calendar. So far it’s been one of the most enjoyable jobs I’ve done at Microsoft, and it’s nice to see people appreciate the work we do. Here’s two postings today on the web about our latest upgrade: CNet: