John Lam on Software

Welcome Mike Stall to the DLR team!

Welcome to our team, Mike!

Mike joins the DLR team from the CLR team. Mike used to work on the CLR debugging subsystem and his only condition for joining our team was that he wouldn't be working on the DLR debugging subsystem :)

Wish Mike luck on his move across the street from Building 42 (we're in Building 41 now). Mike's blog is a tremendous source of information on CLR debugging and deep insights into how children resemble FSMs ...

We're not sure what Mike is going to do on our team, but there is that stack of IronPython bugs that he could fix :) Oh yeah, and there's this language called Ruby ...

Outlook 2007 search busted? Here's the fix

Outlook without search is totally useless to me. I've run into a problem where Outlook reports "Search results may be incomplete because items are still being indexed". It then gives you some idea about how much work is left to do. The problem is that the work remaining never gets done; the indexer is wedged.

Thanks to Serdar Yegulalp for publishing this excellent set of instructions for un-wedging Outlook 2007 search. Outlook is happily re-building its index as I type this.

Popfly goes into public beta!

I still remember the phone call with John Montgomery nearly a couple of years ago. I was in the Chapters in Burlington when John called up with this idea that he had for building a tool that made it easy for folks to create mash-ups on the web. Both John and I were really amazed by the work that _why had done with TryRuby, and we wanted to experiment with some ideas around creating a tool that would teach non-programmers how to program, and help connect those programmers with each other.

I wrote the original prototype that kicked off the Popfly project in a couple of weeks. My prototype (not surprisingly) was heavily code-centric, which is quite unlike what Popfly has become today. "Hello, World" was all an app that grabbed photos of letters tagged in flickr and displayed them on the screen. It was an amazingly fun project though, and I'm really impressed by what the Popfly team has been able to do since then.

Today, John managed to get Steve Ballmer (you really should click on that link) to announce the public beta of Popfly at the Web 2.0 Summit. Go try it out and let them (or me) know what you think!

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IronRuby is now an Open Source project!

Thanks to the hard work of Jon Rosenberg and friends, IronRuby is now officially an Open Source project. On Friday October 12, the OSI approved the Microsoft Public License (or the license formerly known as the Microsoft Permissive License) and the Microsoft Reciprocal License (aka Microsoft Community License).

While many in the community have acknowledged that this was a formality, it's good to put the nonproductive license lawyering behind us so that we can focus on delivering a great Ruby implementation to the community.

We need more help and we're willing to pay for it!

Dynamic languages are becoming more and more important here at Microsoft. We had a dev opening on our team, but that was snapped up internally before we even had a chance to post it externally.

We have an opening on our team for an SDE/T (that's a dev who writes tests / infrastructure). If you like breaking things that devs create, you'll have a lot of fun working on our team. Drop off your application and tell Yasir that I say hi.

Over in Hyderabad India, where our JScript team lives, we have an opening for a Program Manager to help the JScript team advance their cause. I've worked with a couple of devs from IDC (hi Jitu & Nandan!) and they're doing great work over there. If you're interested in more details on the position, please email Shreesh Dubey (I'm hoping he'll post a formal job description somewhere that I can link to).