Showing results for Microspeak - The Old New Thing

Apr 15, 2014
0
0

Microspeak: bar check

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

A bar check sounds like the sort of thing you receive at the end of a long evening of drinking, but that's not what a bar check is. Among the things that happen at ship room meetings is reviewing each bug that has a proposed fix and deciding whether to accept or reject the fix. Another thing that happens at ship room meetings is the bar check: Th...

OtherMicrospeak
Oct 18, 2013
0
0

The case of the redirected standard handles that won't close even though the child process has exited (and a smidge of Microspeak: reduction)

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

A customer had a supervisor process whose job is to launch two threads. Each thread in turn launches a child process, let's call them A and B, each with redirected standard handles. They spins up separate threads to read from the child processes' stdout in order to avoid deadlocks. What they've found is that even though child process&nbs...

CodeMicrospeak
Aug 20, 2013
0
0

Microspeak: The train

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

Hop on board, don't be late, or you'll have to catch the next one.

OtherMicrospeak
Jul 16, 2013
0
0

Microspeak: Landing, especially the heated kind

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

Work on Windows occurs in several different branches of the source code, and changes in one branch propagate to other branches. When talking about a feature or other task becoming visible in a branch, the preferred jargon word at Microsoft is landing. In its purest form: We expect the feature to land in the trunk early next week. The term land...

OtherMicrospeak
Jun 18, 2013
0
0

Microspeak: to family well

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

If you hang out with designers, you may hear the word family used as a verb, usually with the adverb well. The old icons now look dated and do not family well with the Web site. We renamed the feature from Auto Shape to Instant Shape so that it families well with other features like Instant Color. The authenticity certificate on the side of the...

OtherMicrospeak
May 14, 2013
0
0

Microspeak: booked

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

Remember, the term Microspeak is not tightly scoped to mean jargon used only at Microsoft. It's jargon used at Microsoft more often than in general usage. Today, it's a term that you really need to master if you want to talk with others about project planning. To book a feature is to commit to implementing the feature, including assigning resour...

Non-ComputerMicrospeak
Apr 23, 2013
0
0

Microspeak: Tenet

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

In standard English, a tenet is a fundamental belief held by a group of people. At Microsoft, the term tenet is used as a generalization of what we previously called taxes: Things that everybody has to do in order to be a good software citizen. While taxes are typically very low-level and specific, like supporting roaming user profiles or mult...

OtherMicrospeak
Feb 19, 2013
0
0

Microspeak: bubble up

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

Bubble up is the name of a soft drink, but at Microsoft, it means something else. (Remember, Microspeak is not just terms used exclusively within Microsoft, but also terms used at Microsoft more often than in the general population.) To bubble up information is to expose the information at a higher reporting level. For example, you might have a ...

OtherMicrospeak