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My colleague Kam VedBrat (from who I shamelessly stole the pictures of thse high-DPI displays in my PDC talk) discusses the difficult balancing act between customization and supportability. (Part II.) Note that decisions on this subject also also impact compatibility: Windows Vista greatly expands the palette of objects covered by the visua...

When analyzing the performance of a program, you must be mindful that your performance analysis tools can themselves affect the operation of the system you are analyzing. This is especially true if the performance analysis tool is running on the same computer as the program being studied. People often complain that Explorer takes a page fault eve...

My colleague Jensen Harris from the Office User Interface team has joined the 7am club, posting fascinating glimpes into Office history and the upcoming version of Office code-named "Office 12". And they come out at 7am every weekday. Then again, maybe he's not real either. Maybe he's some kind of a robot.

Many people suggest solving the backwards compatibility problem by merely running old programs in a virtual machine. This only solves part of the problem. Sure, you can take a recalcitrant program and run it in a virtual machine, with its own display, its own hard drive, its own keyboard, etc. But there are very few types of programs (games being...

Last night, the MVP Global Summit broke up by product groups for dinner. I was at the Windows Client product group dinner. The problem for me was figuring out who were the MVPs and who were just Microsoft employees looking for MVPs to chat with. Unfortunately, the people who made up the badges didn't think of making it easy to tell who is who. I s...

In case those coming into town for the 2005 MVP Global Summit were interesting in chatting with me, here's my event diary for this week. (Non-native-English-speaking MVPs can hover over the highlighted words for a translation from slang into "standard American-English".) If you want to be sure to catch me, drop me a line and I'll try to make...

Supplementing Sara Ford's PDC trip report: Some of my own stories and observations from the PDC. I met up with Sara at closing time Friday since we coincidentally had the same flight out. Since the flight wasn't for a few hours, it was nice to have someone to chat with to pass the time. (And yet nobody took her up on her lunch date offer. Wh...

I was looking through the feedback from my 2005 PDC talk, and I noticed an interesting contradiction. The written feedback indicated that the first half of my talk (wherein I talked about memory management and "paying your taxes") was more favorably-received than the second half (on user interface issues). On the other hand, nearly all of the ques...

When I discussed why there is no all-encompassing superset version of Windows, people somehow interpreted this as an explanation of why there are so many versions of Windows Vista. I guess these people never even made it past the title of the article, which argues for fewer Windows versions, not more! Besides, the article talked about the ser...

Trying to make light (get it? light?) of the situation, there were quite a few jokes about the power outage at the PDC. The Hands-On Lab was being set up at the time the building went dark. A bunch of us speculated what the technicians must have been thinking when the power went out just as they plugged in a rack of computers... Perhaps in reactio...