Here's a list of ways to be a superstar at work, from GL Hoffman. It applies equally to a 19 year old close to me who's starting her first full time job, or to developers who want to work for me. The examples in the article are aimed at a 20-something working in an office full of older people, in a vaguely technical capacity, and is kinda Web 2.0 ish, but the principles are far broader than that. My two favourites: See Work and On Time. But read them all.

Kate

No, I'm not speaking metaphorically. Apparently in this day and age, on this continent, people are being held against their will, beaten and abused, and forced to work for little or no pay. There's no evidence of an actual slave trade, with people sold from one owner to another, or of babies being born into slavery, but nonetheless there are North American slaves today. Perhaps it's no surprise that the task they are set to, harvesting crops in the warmest parts of the USA, is what most of us have in our heads when we think about long-ago slavery on this continent.

This well researched article in Gourmet, and the articles to which it links, lay it all out. There is no dispute that at least some agricultural workers were in fact enslaved. The only issue is whether it's really common or an isolated incident. Here's a quote:

But when asked if it is reasonable to assume that an American who has eaten a fresh tomato from a grocery store or food-service company during the winter has eaten fruit picked by the hand of a slave, Molloy said, “It is not an assumption. It is a fact.”

Hm. Another reason to eat locally and seasonally. I do realize that our insistence on the lowest price for everything is one of the pressures that make abuses like this seem a reasonable course to some people. The article concludes with this suggestion if you, like me, like to buy tomatoes in the winter:

... take advantage of the fact that fruits and vegetables must be labeled with their country of origin. Most of the fresh tomatoes in supermarkets during winter months come from Florida, where labor conditions are dismal for field workers, or from Mexico, where they are worse, according to a CIW spokesman. One option during these months is to buy locally produced hydroponic greenhouse tomatoes, including cluster tomatoes still attached to the vine. Greenhouse tomatoes are also imported from Mexico, however, so check signage or consult the little stickers often seen on the fruits themselves to determine their source.

Kate

If you've been to a big conference in the past few years you'll have seen the name David Platt on the speaker list, and usually scheduled into the big room. Dave's superbly entertaining speaking style delivers valuable information about user interface design and genuinely meeting the needs of the folks who use the systems you're developing.

Here's an interview with Dave recorded at Tech Ed, and on the Tech Ed Europe sessions page, if you click through to page 2, you can see the one hour version of his talk.

Since Dave mentions used car salesmen in his interview, I'll share a little joke with you. What's the difference between a computer salesman and a used car salesman? The used car salesman knows when he's lying to you.

Kate

One of the major reasons to go to Tech Ed is to meet other people in the industry. Everyone says you get the best jobs, the best advice, the best learning opportunities if you happen to know a lot of people, and the way to know a lot of people is to meet people and talk to them. But haven't we all had trouble finding someone to speak to at conferences? I always seem to end up at a table of sysadmins who know more about PowerShell than would seem humanly possible, or some hardcore DBA types who spend the lunch swapping tales of index problems from hell. If they're having a really technical conversation that's over my head, that's a meeting opportunity come and gone.

Over the years Tech Ed has tried lots of ways to help people find like minded people to talk to. Once you're on site, there are Cabanas or Track Lounges or whatever they call the informal place from year to year. These are great. But what about in the months leading up to Tech Ed? This year, there's something called Tech Ed Connect. You enter some details about yourself and are shown a map where people with similar interests appear closer to you. Mouse over someone and you see their user name (looks like many people are using their name, or initials) possibly a picture, and some details.

(I had to put IE8 in compatibility mode to see the map, by the way.)

You also get a "quick connect" card that can help people find you using this site. Here's mine:

Give it a whirl!

Kate

Some time ago, I told you about an issue with the Tech Ed DVDs and Silverlight versions. I also gave you a workaround for how to play the sessions after looking up the session numbers in a PDF document that functioned as an index. Now Laurent Duveau, a Canadian MVP, has gone one better ... he's written a utility that will fix up the index on the DVDs so you can have an all-electronic experience. Nice work!

Kate

Another Dan Griffin sample you might want to look at is the EC2 Console. I think his description from the first post in that category sums up his approach very nicely:

The purpose of the EC2 Console, like the other ones, is to demonstrate an attractive (WPF-based), novel, and useful application on Windows. In this case, we chose as our vehicle a helpful control panel for Windows developers who are new to cloud computing and would like to experiment with Windows Server, ASP.NET, and MS SQL on Amazon’s EC2 platform.

As it happens, Amazon already has an EC2 console (currently in Beta). But we’re going to differentiate ourselves from that in two ways. First, our EC2 Console will be specific to developers targetting Windows, and we can automate many administration tasks given that assumption. Second, our console (again, a WPF client app) will exhibit the kind of superior usability that is very difficult to achieve via the browser.

Client applications have many more advantages than just offline availability. Here's an application that's only useful when you're online, but is going to be a client application anyway. Follow along and see why.

Kate

Dan Griffin is working on some samples for client development and blogging his progress as he writes them. His SPOS sample combines workflow with access to local hardware (in this case, a fingerprint reader) to create an application where you could approve, say, purchase orders with a fingerprint swipe. It's a good example of the kind of application that is better as a local client application than something web-based and browser hosted.

He's created a Codeplex site where interim releases are appearing, and a blog category where you can follow his progress, read his musings on what fingerprint reader to buy, and so on. This is a sample designed for you to use in your own work, so follow along and see if it can help you.

Kate

I have a favourite piece of advice, and I give it even though it frustrates many recipients. If you want to write, write! If you want to get into public speaking, speak in public! If you want to start a user group, start a user group! If you want to be an MVP, do what MVPs do (advise others and solve problems and volunteer for stuff) and you'll start to get the benefit even before you get the award. I'm not quite saying Just Do It but the fact is the barriers to entry are very very small these days and possibly non existent. Technical writing especially - start a blog or get active on newsgroups and presto, you're writing! Listen to feedback (people telling you you're wrong is bad, people thanking you for your answer or quoting you elsewhere is good) and you will get better. Public speaking isn't much harder to crack because the world is full of user group leaders and similar folks who need someone to speak to them month after month. It's also full of Code Camps and other places to get started (they tend to come with coaching and encouragement too.)

Still some people don't like this advice. They feel held back from what they want to do, and they don't like to be told "nothing is holding you back, you can start whenever you want." Alternatively, they don't want to speak or write or lead for free, they want to be paid for it, and they don't like the idea of starting for free and working hard for years to get that overnight success. So here's a rephrasing that maybe you'll prefer: "80% of success is just showing up." It's attributed to Woody Allen, not a guy I would normally take advice from, but it sure is accurate. Go to the meeting, open the document you're supposed to be writing, be there when someone asks for volunteers, go to the whiteboard and draw as much as you know, put your shoes on and go outside, ... not all at once of course, but these are the "just showing up" tasks that get you on the road to success. Try it.

Kate

Paul and Kimberly are so romantic! Paul started it with a Valentines Day post about how to be a better speaker, giving lots of credit to his lovely wife. So naturally she followed up with a post of her own. If you've never seen Kimberly speak, you really should, even if you don't know anything about her topics. We're often speaking at the same time but the few times I've managed to get free time and sneak into the back of her room, I've been tremendously entertained and learned more about SQL Server as well. I know, too, how much time sweating demos, rewriting things, practicing, and just plain working hard goes into being so entertaining and accurate. You start to get a sense of that by reading these posts - from the tiniest detail of what to wear to the vital "practise your demos" and "show up for your tech check" you can understand that what matters most is caring. If you want to give a great talk you will do all that it takes to give that great talk.

None of their tips are SQL-specific. Read them and you're on the way to getting better. Get out there and do some talks with this in mind, and you're really starting to get it.

Kate

Well perhaps not all the way to Considered Harmful but Allen Holub is willing to call them Evil. I came across this article because I'm teaching OO Analysis and Design again this year and my students have generally already heard that the way you do encapsulation is you make all your attributes private and then add a public get and set method for every attribute. What's more, they generally feel if you change the type of the attribute then you need to change the return type of the get and the parameter type of the set. This of course gets you pretty much nowhere, and this is what Allen is railing against.

Now I am OK with Get methods as long as you swear you will never change the return type. The example I give the students is a bank account class with a balance. In the original design you keep the balance as a floating point number, 12.34000000 for 12 dollars and 34 cents. You add a GetBalance() method that returns a float, and Deposit() and Withdraw() methods that take (among other things) floats to represent the amount being deposited or withdrawn. Now when implementation time rolls along you discover that floating point arithmetic is expensive computationally, and needs lots of rounding to stay accurate: add 1.00 to 1.00, then add another 1.00 and the time may come when your number ends .01 or .99 ... neither of which banks care for tremendously. So you decide to store the balance as an integer number of pennies. Everything is OK in my book as long as you DO NOT CHANGE the signature of GetBalance(), nor of Deposit and Withdraw. These methods don't need to know what you just did. When Deposit tells you the amount is 50.00 dollars, your code can multiply by 100 to get 5,000 pennies, and add that to the balance. GetBalance() can divide by 100 (and round) to change pennies to dollars. That's a good use of a Getter method.

I am less OK with Set methods. I sure don't want a SetBalance() method. Deposit(), Withdraw(), and their cousins will change the balance. But there's no business rule in which it becomes necessary to announce that account 123456 now has $183.27 in it, and set the balance to that number. Having the method just encourages some code outside the class to do things that belong in the class - calculating service charges, or giving interest perhaps. Locking up access to the value means that if your business rules change, you don't need to look outside the bank account class for code that implements those business rules.

So do I think Get and Set methods are Evil? No, but I do think they should not be your first reflex, one of each per attribute. Make them earn their place.

Kate

Here's another Channel 9 Video you need to watch: Rico Mariani: Visual Studio Today, Tomorrow and Beyond - Your Questions Answered. I love that in addition to planning for version 10 of Visual Studio, he's planning for 11, 12, and to a certain extent 13. To have the courage to start on a feature that won't really be done for ten years is very impressive. I'm looking forward to "Dev10" for a lot of reasons ... even more after watching this video.

Kate

You know the blog, now watch the Channel 9 video featuring Damien Watkins, Rick Molloy, and Don McCrady. I like this one because they talk about how they ended up changing their minds over the course of development, moving from a language-based approach to a libraries-based one. They get into why that's better and what C++ 0x features they needed to make it possible. A nice way to spend a little under an hour.

Kate

Yochay has been very busy talking to Channel 9 and preparing Windows 7 material for developers. Here's a blog post from early January that lists some taskbar related videos you will want to watch. Screenshots of the taskbar really don't convince you of how much easier it is to use.

Still I can't keep from trying. Let me show you how I close things now. Imagine I have (among other things) a Notepad instance open on my machine. The "old way" to close it, if it doesn't have focus, is to right-click the icon on the taskbar and then choose close. You can still do that in Windows 7:

That's a right click, let go, move the mouse, left click. We know how to do that, and it's a ton less mouse moving than left click, wait while window paints, go on all the way up to the top right, click the red X. But I like this even better:

If I just move the mouse (no clicking) over the icon of one of the Notepad instances, they all show their thumbnails. One of them (the one I moused over) has a little red x showing in the thumbnail. Without clicking, if I move the mouse onto the thumbnail and pause a moment, I get the "peek" where that window appears (in case I can't tell from these tiny little thumbnails) and everything else goes transparent. If I click the little red x in the thumbnail, the instance closes. It's less clicks, it's noticeably faster and smoother.

These are the sorts of things that are making me so glad I put Windows 7 on the prime laptop. I would not go back!

Kate

Jennifer Marsman points out her favourite new Windows 7 feature - different default printers when you're on different networks. To bring up the dialog she shows in her blog post, bring up the Devices and Printers dialog (I do that by clicking Start and typing printer), then select a printer. That will give you a printer-related toolbar:

And yes "no network" counts as a network, so I can have the XPS writer as my default when I'm not on the network (if you've ever accidentally clicked a Print icon on a toolbar and then had to wait over a minute while the search for the printer timed out, you'll know why my default isn't really a printer at all) but I can have a useful default printer when I am on the network. Fantastic, and thanks Jennifer for telling us about it!

Kate

There's been a reasonable amount of blog talk about the removal of the "quick launch" area from the Windows 7 taskbar. What isn't coming across in the blogs I read is how there is an across-the-board attempt to make the taskbar more useful. Sure, making it easy to flip focus to a background window to see how it's doing is a good idea. But saving you from having to flip focus is a better idea, right? Take a look at this:

It's a piece of my taskbar, and the icon with the green on it is an Internet Explorer download dialog. That's a green overlay progress bar going across it. Here's another a few minutes later:

This is really, genuinely useful. And if you're thinking that getting your own applications to take advantage of this will require you to learn a bunch of API calls and the like - think again! If you have a progress bar control on screen, the overlaying in the taskbar will be done for you automatically on Windows 7. How's that for fun?

Kate

We all face times when we have a picture and we want the text. Maybe we have a printout we can scan, but we don't have one of those cool photocopiers that scans to a true text format like PDF or XPS. Maybe we took a screenshot during a web cast and don't want to retype all the code. That sort of thing. There used to be OCR in Word, but in Word 2007 it seems to have disappeared. No worries though, it resurfaced in One Note.

Here's a screenshot from a private web cast last summer (the actual content is in a recent Visual C++ team blog, so no worries about revealing super secret info):

Now, I open a new One Note document, paste this jpg into it, then right-click:

You can hit paste right in One Note if you like, but it tries to capture formatting etc. I pasted into Notepad and got this:

Some samples
structXfl;
void meow(constX&)cout<<”meowconstX&):Copying.”<<endI;}
void meow(X&&) cout << “meow(X&&): Moving.’ <<endl;}
XfooOIreturn XO;}
const X bar() return X(); }
mt main()
Xa;
constXb;
meow(a); I/Copying
meow(b); I/Copying
meow(fooO); ii Moving
meow(barO); II Copying
}

OK, it needs some spaces, and it's not too smart about {} or //, but it's quicker than typing it all yourself. And if you have a boatload of ordinary typed text (say a paragraph from a printed RFP that you want to quote in an email to various folks, or a powerpoint presentation) then it's even more accurate. And it's probably on your machine already!

Kate

I had read that Windows 7 did the perf calculations differently than Vista, so I thought I would compare them. I took a picture of my settings as part of the whole "back up everything three different ways" process before the upgrade (me? burned before? ya think?) and here's what it said:

After the upgrade, it said:

So the same conclusion, but drawn from different numbers. Bottom line is I could mess around with this laptop and it would be faster, but it works for my day to day use. And things feel zippier on Windows 7. Sleeping and waking up, for sure. And finding the files I want ... but that's about jump lists and previews.

Kate

Well, I did it. I put the Windows 7 beta on the laptop I use day in and day out. This machine had Vista on it, and the upgrade was utterly painless. All my software was still there and still working fine when the install was complete. The only glitch was that my built-in touchpad has become invisible in some way. This means I can't configure it to be less sensitive, which in turn means I was "clicking" a lot when I didn't mean to. I disabled it completely (using the 1980s-style UI of the edit-your-settings-on-boot experience) and other than having to carry a mouse with me when I take the laptop somewhere, there's been no other impact.

First impressions: I use jump lists a lot. Enough for a separate blog post. I like everything I noticed, except the default large-icons, no-text, group-everything setting on the taskbar. I fixed that:

(I've cropped it so it doesn't stretch the page)

I've said it before and I've said it again ... you can't really learn a product if you kick up a VPC once in a while but live your life in a different product. Windows 7 is stable enough to live in, and living in it will show what it's really like soon enough. I'm liking what I'm living.

Kate

I've been saying for a while that the Vista Bridge is now a living project that gets updated. And here we have our second Code Gallery release already. I think it's worth saying again what I said when 1.3 was released:

Here you can download the latest version, join discussions, and report issues including native APIs you wish were wrapped. Remember, this is a sample library, not a product, so don't expect the kind of support, internationalization, or full coverage a product would have. Do expect useful code for reading (if you care about how to do interop well) or just using (if you want to light up your application with Vista features without knowing about interop.)

I've been doing quite a lot of speaking on this wrapper library and it really makes all the difference in the world if you'd like to adopt the latest OS functionality from your managed (C# or VB.NET) application.

I did a quick search to see who had been writing about our library and was a little surprised to find a Wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vista_Bridge. But it turns out that's about an actual bridge, that cars drive on, on Vista Avenue in Portland Oregon. Ah well.

Kate

Should I be interested in a top 100 list I'm not on? Of course I should. Here's a list of developer blogs, painstakingly gathered by Jurgen Appelo. He looked at Google PageRank, Alexa traffic rankings, Technorati authority ratings, how many people link to the blog, commenting rate, and the RSSMicro FeedRank. In other words, an objective gathering of our collective subjective opinions of each other. While I have no clue how to measure any of those things, I can tell you I read 4 of his top ten and 11 of the top 100 at least once a week. If I were looking for more blogs to read, this list would include plenty of excellent candidates. Check it out!

Kate

I like Scott Berkun's blog a lot. He often shares insightful glimpses of what it takes to achieve. In this entry, he talks about how ratsen fratsen hard it is to write a book. This reminds me that I don't want to write any more books (in case watching Julie finish hers wasn't reminder enough) and also connects to the trouble I sometimes have with other long term unstructured projects. Deciding to work on what needs to be worked on is how you show your character. Day in, day out. Don't like the character you're showing? Decide differently, starting today.

Kate

Let me share with you something I heard on the TV the other night that really clicked with me. "As I get older," the man said, "I find that I ask myself questions more. You know, why am I here?". He paused, and I nodded. The older we get the more life we have to ponder the meaning of. Then continued. "It's not exactly philosophy though. It's more ... why am I here... in the basement? What the heck did I come down here for? "

Oh yeah. That I do even more than the pondering.

Kate

The WPF team have released an interesting document called the WPF Application Quality Guide. You can download it as a .doc file from that page, or just read it on line. It's an intruiging combination of handy links (Getting Started with WPF), overview diagrams, philosophy and advice around testing and development that would apply to non WPF projects as well, and very WPF-specific practices (should I derive from Control or UserControl?) aimed at testers and developers alike. The Word version runs to almost 80 pages but not all the sections will apply to every reader. You should take a look at it, for sure.

Kaet

While I was in Redmond I met Alon Fliess, who like me is a C++ MVP and is exploring Windows 7 (and Vista before it) from a native point of view as well as a managed one. About two months ago he mused about the "rebirth" of C++ in these times, not just because some of those operating system APIs are easier to get to from native code, but also because of new native capabilities (the continued MFC updates, the native Web Services library, the concurrency services) that just keep being added to the arsenal available to C++ programmers. (He has some helpful links in the blog post - you could also search through here if you like.)

I think it's a good point. If you know C++, now's a good time to use it. If you don't, then hang around (at least virtually) with those who do - we can point out some cool things. And thanks to the magic of interop, wrappers, and C++/CLI, perhaps we can make some of those cool things a little easier to get to from managed code.

Kate

Rands has some cool advice for being a fantastic manager in a pretty big company leading a pretty big team. It isn't all applicable to managing a whole company and having no boss, as I do, or to leading a smallish team without hire and fire power, as many developers do when they first move to management. But a lot of it is. Try this for a start:

... at the end of the day when you ask, “What did I build today?” The answer will be a troubling, “Nothing”. The days of fixing ten bugs before noon are gone. You’re no longer going to spend the bus ride home working on code; you’re going to be thinking hard about how to say something important to someone who doesn’t want to hear it. There will be drama. And there be those precious seconds when there is no one in your office wanting… something.

If that resonates with you, read the whole thing. You'll be glad you did.

Kate

I've been in Redmond all week (some Windows 7-related fun that I'll discuss later) and rented a car. Look at the license plate I happened to get:

I don't know why it's Oregon. Probably all the Washington DEV plates are taken . When I first saw it, I said to myself "somewhere here there's a 22 year old developer who wishes this plate was available." It was several days before I remembered that Gregory Consulting was founded in 1986. Nice.

Kate

The Visual Studio site has been completely revamped.

It's fun and a good source of information even for those of us who already know our way around Visual Studio. Check out the Community tab for videos and links to blogs.

Kate

I love hand-edited blog aggregations. You get relevant technical material without the cute cat pictures. I have a gadget that shows me headlines from the blogs of my fellow Regional Directors, but anyone can have it. Here's how it looks on my sidebar:

If I click a headline, it pops out with a summary:

Click the more link and it goes straight to the post on the original site.

You can get the gadget from Live Gallery and install it on your own machine very easily. Alternatively you can see the aggregation in a browser at http://www.microsoftregionaldirectors.com/. I've said before what a smart group of people this is and how very much you can learn from following their blogs. It's all the more true when someone else does the monitoring and editing for you. Enjoy!

Kate

Brian Marble reports that the session selection process is almost complete. I submitted a few talks, of course, and I also know of at least one talk submitted by someone else in Microsoft with me as the speaker. The dust hasn't quite settled yet (the session titles should be on the web in February) but I do know that at least one of my sessions has been accepted. Yay! I'll add more details when it's official, but for now ... see you in LA in May!

You can register now, by the way, and get a nice discount and snag a good hotel room...

Kate

You know the deal when you demo beta (or worse, pre-beta) software. That stuff has audience detectors in it! Sure, it works on the plane, but just wait until you get in front of people. I’ve had my share of demo deaths, but I don’t think I’ve managed to look this cool about it:

Steve Teixeira tells the story in this blog entry.

Kate

I attended more events than usual in 2008, and I spoke at roughly the same number as usual, for me. But many people are saying they plan to attend fewer events in 2009 than usual, and what’s more they’re saying that might not be a bad thing. In a time when sessions are online, when you can search the web for the blog of the person who wrote the feature you’re interested in, why would you pay for a plane ticket and a hotel room, not to mention a substantial admission fee? I can think of at least three reasons why I do it: for the time spent with likeminded attendees, for the time spent with speakers, and as an oasis from my other obligations that’s devoted to this particular topic. There’s a fourth that you won’t notice unless you go to conferences that are well-curated: somebody is taking the time to select sessions, to select speakers, and even to get the sessions delivered in a sensible order. For more on this point, you should read Andrew Brust’s blog entry on the importance of track chairs in the 21st century.

Kate

Short answer: yes, you can open up Visual Studio 2008’s Team Explorer and point it at your not-upgraded-yet 2005 TFS server and be happy. If you are curious about other levels of mixing and matching and compatibility, check Grant Holliday’s chart.

Kate

I was working on a service recently (pretty cool actually, it is a Windows Service that hosts a WCF Web Service) and I was fiddling with it and installing and uninstalling it, and I was getting frustrated. I couldn’t install the new version because it already existed. I couldn’t uninstall it because it was “marked for deletion” whatever that means. I found a knowledge base article which suggested rebooting my machine. Sure, that’s no trouble at all. Grr. Then I found Avner Kashtan’s blog entry. I can’t believe the simple fix he provides. And it WORKS! Go on, read it there. You’ll thank me.

Kate

Leon Bambrick, aka Secret Geek, reveals the true differences between small businesses and enterprises. Like Dilbert, it’s only funny because it’s true.

Kate

Continuing my theme of 2008 in review, the year was interesting because it featured the breaking of two rules I have long held to be utterly true. These rules are cynical and depressing and people generally do not want to believe them. I am known for my optimism and yet I assure you these rules are true and you cannot escape them:

• There is no such thing as a “slow yes”.
• You will never get paying work (or a sale) from that guy you sat next to on the airplane.

Let’s start with the mythical “slow yes.” All there really is in this world is the “fast yes”, the “fast no”, and the “slow no”. I am sure you have been asked to give somebody a donation, or to buy something, that you didn’t really want to give or buy, and so you said “can you send me a letter about that?” or “can you send me a proposal?” when what you really meant was “can I please get off the phone so I don’t have to face saying no to you?” It’s a “slow no.” We have all done this. Yet for some reason when we are trying to get the sales (or the donations, or to be hired) we get off the phone and tell our co-workers or family or whatever, “Success! He wants me to send a proposal!” or “Score! They’ve got nothing now, but he wants me to phone back in a month!”

I have been a consultant for over 20 years. When people want to hire our firm to help with a problem they’re experiencing, they hire us. Sometimes there’s an RFP to respond to, sometimes they need to show a written proposal to someone, but generally they say “I want you to do this” and then we talk about paperwork. When people don’t particularly want to hire us (and usually that’s because the conversation was my idea, and I am trying to sell work to people who were minding their own business) they ask for proposals, or they say “well, we would have to have a meeting about that but I’m really busy this week so how about I call you in two or three weeks?” This is the start of the “slow no”. They won’t ever say “no” or “go away” but they won’t ever give you work either. You can spend days and weeks and months thinking you are “working on sales” because you are emailing these people and asking if there’s been any change, you’re sending these people generic proposals (because you don’t know their specific problem, and that in turn is because they haven’t told you a problem they want you to solve, and you know why that is? They don’t have a problem they want you to solve), and you’re updating your tickle lists, all of which sure as hell feels like work, but is not in fact accomplishing anything.

So when I finally learned this lesson (and I believe I read it somewhere, and fought it for a while, and then came to know it was true) my life got simpler. I rarely phone or email strangers (or even former clients) and try to pester them into giving me work. If for some reason I do, and they’re not very interested in hiring us, I don’t put a lot of time and effort into trying to persuade them otherwise. I assume that people who want to hire us will make the effort to do so. This has lowered my stress tremendously.

But you know what they say about the exception that proves the rule? We got an RFP from some people we didn’t know, through a third party who felt we’d be good for it. It was highly specific about what technology to use – an Access application distributed as a single file to be installed on each workstation, a SQL backend to be shared by all these workstations, no offline story, a VB6 application to run in the system tray and notify you if another user added something to the shared repository you should know about, that sort of thing – and our first guess of effort doing it their way was well over (perhaps even double) what the third party believed was their budget. So we wrote back and declined to bid. Months later, we heard they were putting it out again. So we asked if it was ok to ignore all their tech specs and submit a solution to the underlying business problem, which was well described in their material. They said go ahead, so we did: suggesting a SharePoint store, some workflow to handle their special business rules, and some Reporting Services goodness for the managers. Total cost including buying all the SharePoint licenses at full retail was less than the whispered budget, and we were pulling in a raft of features that they had on their wishlist for v2 such as email notifications when things were changed. It was a great proposal.

Great or not, it got no response. After about 2 or 3 months I wrote to confirm that we didn’t get it. And was told “actually, we haven’t decided yet.” I imagined a conversation in a boardroom somewhere with one person saying “can she not read? We clearly said SYSTEM TRAY!” and another saying “look how much more solution to our problems we will get for the money!” Some more months went by and you know what? We got the gig. Well over a year from the first RFP to being hired for the project. It’s underway now. I will point out that although this was a slow yes, it didn’t get to yes as a result of pestering actions on my part. I patiently waited (while working on other stuff for real clients) and these guys came to me when their process had worked its way through to a decision.

The second rule that sales people need to learn is that those “hey cool your product sounds perfect for us why don’t you drop me an email” conversations on the plane just do not, in general, lead to sales. Again, the guy just wants to be nice and to go away in a pleasant and positive way. Pestering Mr 13B to see if he’s ready to pull the trigger on the order that will save your year may feel like work, but it isn’t getting you anywhere. If Mr 13B wanted your product, he would have taken your card, and he would have emailed you the minute he got his laptop on the network. That silence and absence of emails from Mr 13B is basically “he’s just not that into you” or in this case, your product.

That said, here’s the story that breaks the rule. Sasha, my MVP lead, spent some time last year in a customs lineup, and got chatting with the fellow next to him in line. That fellow needed some mentoring or consulting from a senior person with solid C++ and project management skills who could suggest a good architecture for his new product, and then help to get it built. Sasha took the guy’s card and sent me one of those “X, meet Y” emails. A conversation ensued, followed by meetings, and the end result: the product is very clever and I am delighted to be part of the team that is building it. We ended up with no C++ in the product, but that doesn’t worry me at all. It meets a genuine business need and supports the way people in that business need to do their jobs. And my client would not have found me if he wasn’t willing to chat to a complete stranger about the software he was trying to build.

I still say the rules are true, despite the specific exceptions I met this year. Or more accurately, that the smart way to live your life is as though these rules are true. Selling consulting services is not like selling timeshares or couches. You can’t bully people into it or catch them in a moment of weakness and trick them into saying yes. They have to want to choose you to solve their problems. That isn’t something you can persuade them to want by “following up” every two weeks. So I just plain do not do that. Some folks who I like and haven’t worked with for a while get a note sometimes (especially if I come across something that reminds me of them) but I don’t set out to make people buy our services. I don’t lose sales by spending less time “working on sales” and I certainly don’t lose sleep. If anything it frees my time to talk to people who genuinely want our help. That’s way more fun anyway.

Kate

Anyone who blogs on technical topics soon notices they get a lot more hits if they wander into non technical areas for a post or two. That’s just because there are more non technical people out there, searching for tips on stain removal or coupons for TGI Fridays, than there are people who want to know how to get a manifest on an executable or how to write a C++/CLI wrapper for native code or what’s coming in Visual Studio 2010. That’s why my top ten posts last year are:

1 - XPS Document Viewer – Nov 19th 2006
I guess people are still getting XPS documents and don’t know how to read them. OK. Not sure why my page would be the one that over 7000 people find, but what the heck, the information is still valid.

2 - Reading Office 2007 files – Nov 23rd 2006
Also from two years ago but people still need to know this. I send people this link whenever I get one of those “I can’t read your attachment because I’m not on Office 2007 yet” replies to an email. I didn’t send it out 4000 times though, so I guess a lot of people are searching for this stuff.

3 - Try Www.mappoint.com – August 18th 2004
I read recently that people don’t seem to realize they can type URLS into the address bar on their browsers, and have their home pages set to search engines, and actually type entire URLS into search boxes so they can click the result. I would deny this could happen, except many years ago I had a client who did just this, so I know there really are people who do this. I also can’t think of any other reason why over 2500 people would read a four year old post comparing MapPoint to MapQuest given that everybody these days uses either maps.google.com or maps.live.com.

4 - Introduction to Workflow in SharePoint 2007 – June 22nd 2006
Yep, workflow was a hugely important addition to SharePoint. We’re loving it in the SharePoint project we’re doing now. Again this is a topic that must surely be better covered somewhere else though. Still almost 2500 people stopped by to learn about workflow – I hope they followed the link to learn more, and learn something a little more recent – say from after the product was released?

5 - How to earn a million Aeroplan miles – Oct 1st 2005
Now this is really non-technical, but it caught my attention and I guess plenty of other people’s too. I have some other blog entries from time to time about Aeroplan miles, but I don’t really cover how to earn them. For that I highly recommend Flyertalk’s Aeroplan forum.

6 - Batch-convert Visual Studio 2005 projects to Visual Studio 2008 – Dec 17th 2007
The most recent entry yet in this top ten. It makes sense that something that gets hits all year does better than something that wasn’t even around for the first half of 2008. And this is a useful tip I haven’t seen many other places. All those searching people should just subscribe to John Robbins – searching only helps you if you know something exists and want to find it. Smart blogs like John show you things you hadn’t imagined existing.

7 - Another Way to Get the Shield on a Button (or Anywhere Else) – Jan 30th 2008
Finally, something from 2008 in the 2008 top ten! And this is a good tip from Daniel Moth. Remember, the shield on a menu item or button doesn’t bring up the UAC prompt any more than putting ... on a menu item brings up a dialog. And nothing puts the shield there for you if you trigger a prompt any more than something puts the ... for you when it sees you have code to show a dialog. All of this is just sensible developer tradition that helps users feel comfortable with the software they’re using. So please play along and help people know what to expect.

8 - Don't compile MFC apps with /clr:pure – Jan 17th 2007
This one seemed like a no-brainer – MFC includes native stuff, /clr:pure means I don’t have any native stuff, but I was getting emails asking for help and this kept turning out to be the issue. So I blogged it. A lot of my blog topics are the answers to random emails I get from people who are looking for help. This way an extra 1500 or so people saw the answer in 2008.

9 - Hot Laptop? Here's a tip – May 14th 2006
It’s still good advice for working with an overheating laptop. I’m not sure if the searchers all had that problem or were using “hot” more metaphorically.

10 - Adding a manifest to a Vista application – Oct 3rd 2006
This is mostly a link over to Catherine Heller’s Visual Studio 2005 instructions, except that I really wanted to call out how much less work it was for Visual C++ compared to C# and VB.NET. Anyway it’s all a ton easier with Visual Studio 2008 these days.

What else can I tell you from my stats? I got almost a million visits over the year, and they averaged 2.71 requests – meaning most folks clicked around a bit once they arrived. That’s heartening. In 2008 I set myself a goal to blog every day. I didn’t achieve that – there were several long gaps in there – but I did post 135 times. I still like the quote from my post on June 1st, resuming after a four-month gap: “Blogging, like speaking at a Quaker meeting, is something one must do only if the spirit moves one.” I’m looking forward to having my spirit move me hundreds of times in 2009.

Kate

2008 was a tumultuous year for me so I thought I would start a new tradition of doing a retrospective post.

In January, I started doing something at Trent that I had never done before in ten years of teaching there a course or two a year – teach the same course twice at once, on different nights in different locations. I think the Tuesday night people got a better course since I in effect rehearsed for them each Monday morning . The marking load was a little difficult but I managed it. Also in January I had a geekspeak appearance, and the planning started in earnest for Tech Ed.

In February I spoke at my own user group, which is always a treat, and the Toronto Heroes Happen Here event introduced Visual Studio 2008, SQL Server 2008, and Windows 2008 to Toronto.

March kicked off with SD West, where I did two sessions (Vista programming for half a day, and some Practical VSTS tips) and recorded a video interview. I really enjoyed SD West’s sense of difference – the attendees, speakers, and topics all had a little fresh and unusual twist to me compared to the conferences Microsoft runs. My schedule doesn’t often let me get to third party conferences but it’s definitely enjoyable when it does. Also in March, we closed our Peterborough offices after nearly a decade there, and consolidated back to a single office attached to our home. Times have changed since we set up the Peterborough offices – we have high speed Internet at home, couriers are no longer an important delivery mechanism for us, and we haven’t employed a university student for many years – so we decided paying rent and commuting 45 minutes each way every day was a foolish habit. It really has been one of my best decisions of the year.

April’s big fun was the MVP Summit. My schedule was jam-packed and my only regret was that the C++ team didn’t schedule any boring or irrelevant parts of the day that might have let me go visit another team to broaden my horizons.

In May, Chris Dufour and I held our own Heroes Happen Here launches in Peterborough and Whitby. We had a scaled down version of the Toronto event and enjoyed it a great deal. Then DevTeach came to town – my absolute favourite third party conference always. As well it provided an opportunity for the Canadian RDs to get together and that is never a bad thing!

June, of course, meant Tech Ed. A precon, lunch with Bill Gates, three breakouts, two podcasts, assorted booth duty / ask the experts / etc plus dinners, receptions and side meetings made for a whirlwind week. The sort of thing I work all year to get, to be honest ... I loved it!

I started July by recording a .NET Rocks episode. Another thing I don’t get to do enough of. Then I just settled down and worked on projects for a while. Community activity is always a bit slow in the summer. As my project work intensified (nothing I can announce at the moment) I stayed heads down right through to the end of October when the PDC rolled around. We were all full of pent-up PDC demand after so long without one, and it was good, really good.

Just one week home after PDC, and trying to catch up on that project work, and it was off to Barcelona (maybe for the last time?) for Tech Ed Europe. I would have had an amazingly great time even if I hadn’t placed a talk in the top ten, but I was lucky enough to do just that. The food, the scenery, the weather – I am really going to miss Barcelona.

In December I got back on the community stage by visiting three southern cities to tell the story of Vista Bridge. I got caught in a snowstorm in Baton Rouge, the like of which they get once or twice a century, just to add a little spice to the tale. And that brings us around to the end of the year. What's next?

So is there anything you hate more than the old "Unknown Error" when you're doing Sharepoint development? I found this tip on Madhur Ahuja's old blog (he moved it earlier this year) and it's short enough I can paste it here:

Find the web.config for the site you normally use as your development site. Locate this tag:

<SafeMode ... CallStack="false">

and change it to CallStack="true".

Set <CUSTOMERRORS mode="On">to mode="Off".

Set <compilation debug="false" batch="false">to <compilation debug="true" batch="true">

Now you will get the full stack trace as soon as the error is raised.

Works like a charm! Well done Madhur, and thankyou!

Kate

This has been a very busy fall for me, with more travel than usual. So it was timely to read this article about what got through airport security and what didn't. I actually wasn't worried that the flags, tshirts and pamphlets expressing pro-terrorist views got through ... the mandate is supposed to be to keep out bad items, and your chances of killing someone with a tshirt aren't dependent on what's printed on it. But the 80 ounces of liquid (by using a silly Beer Belly pouch under your shirt) or ordinary water bottles with hand typed Saline Solution labels make me resent every bottle of water, can of coke etc that's been taken from me. And the ID triangle thing was new to me ... in Canada the security people don't check your ID but the airline does, a lot.

You go along, of course you go along. A security type took my passport from me while my stuff was going through the Xray. I asked for it back. She said "you can have it on the other side." I said "you are allowed my boarding pass, but not my passport." She said "you wanna argue or you wanna catch your plane?". Sigh. She gave it back on the other side, but what if she hadn't? They would have all said "oh no ma'am, our staff never take your passport, only your boarding pass."

The article is definitely worth a read.

Kate

Whenever I go to a conference I run into people who make software so differently than I make it. I also run into people who do the same things I'm doing, but they have a name for it and I don't. Someone asked me recently if I "did Agile." I always answer that we're not "formally Agile" which frankly I find very funny. We do have a client though, for whom we ship a new release every month. They ask for things (typically with emails) we design and estimate, together we draw up a list of what will be in the next phase and when it will release, and then we mostly do that. I say mostly because sometimes over the month they change their minds, or their customers impose a business change on them, and we tweak the list a little, but just about every month they get a refresh and their software has evolved to meet their new needs.

So there are plenty of people who will tell me, since I ship every month, I'm Agile. I guess so. But we don't do scrum. We don't do burn lists. We don't do pair programming. We don't have a daily anything. We manage all this with TFS and with a Word document called "phase 13 as approved.doc" that has a table in it listing work items, their descriptions, and their status. We don't really use any of the deliverables or artifacts that are considered Agile today.

So, with that mindset (what makes you Agile) I have two links for you.

First, http://martinfowler.com/articles/newMethodology.html. This is Martin Fowler on agility, the essay he first wrote in 2000. It talks about how requirements change, how people are not all the same, how customers adapt, and so on. To my great surprise it lists the Rational Unified Process as an Agile technique. His conclusion is a damn good one:

So where should you not use an agile method? I think it primarily comes down the people. If the people involved aren't interested in the kind of intense collaboration that agile working requires, then it's going to be a big struggle to get them to work with it. In particular I think that this means you should never try to impose agile working on a team that doesn't want to try it.

Second, http://www.agilemanagement.net/Articles/Papers/CMMIandAgileWhynotembrace.html. Unfortunately the paper is only available as a PDF, but this page has a link to it. The abstract:

Agile development methods and CMMI (Capability Maturity Model^® Integration) best practices are often perceived to be at odds with each other. This report clarifies why the discord need not exist and proposes that CMMI and Agile champions work toward deriving benefit from using both and exploit synergies that have the potential to dramatically improve business performance.

OK, so it isn't written in a conversational style, but you know, it makes some really good points. I've just started a project in which we're using the CMMI templates for TFS, just to see what it's like, and we're being our usual "get the detailed requirements and do the design at the last responsible moment" on it (we have sensible phases which makes this possible) and you know what? It's working pretty well.

So, you think you know your methodologies, but I recommend you read both of these papers and then see how you feel. You may be surprised. You may be pleased (I was.) And you may start working more effectively.

Kate

So maybe Bill never said "640K ought to be enough for anybody" or maybe he did. Truth is there was a time when we had far far less than 640 to play with, when we had 64 or so and didn't complain, and there are still people and languages that are left over from that time, who treasure every byte and are careful with their allocations. That's mostly just a vestige and not a useful habit, but there is one place where that approach is still right - when every byte of your code will get downloaded every time it is run. In other words, code on a web page that will execute client side. Everything old is new again as you know.

So, how much cool can you pack into a tiny payload? Or as the Mix folks ask,

What could you create for the Web if you only had 10 kilobytes of code? It's time to exercise your minimalist creativity and get back to basics - back to optimizing every little byte like your life depended on it.

Yep, it's a contest, with real money prizes ($1500) plus a fully-paid trip to Mix for one winner. The rules:

• Source files and embedded images for your web application cannot exceed a size of 10 kilobytes (not compiled); only the xaml, cs, vb, or "language of your choice" files and embedded resources are counted against the 10 kilobyte limit. Build instruction files are not counted against the limit (for example, Visual Studio Solution and Project files).
• Your web application must either use Microsoft® Silverlight™ or Windows Presentation Foundation, as a XAML Browser Application running in Partial Trust or as a ClickOnce application.
• Your web application cannot include external libraries or assemblies. Data from web services is permitted, provided that you have obtained all consents, approvals, or licenses required to use the data as part of the web application that you create. Although data can be requested, you cannot use services to provide extra functionality.
• Entries will be judged on originality, graphic design / user experience and functionality.

Gonna enter?

Kate

I'm a very positive person, as anyone will tell you who has met me. I actively work at keeping a happy attitude in a variety of circumstances. And it is work, more than just smiling no matter what happens. For example, who you choose to spend time with makes a big difference - spend a conference with someone cynical who keeps saying "what a waste of time this is" and you will skip most sessions and go home saying the conference was a waste of time. Spend your time with someone excited about the material who joins in conversations about what this might mean and where that could take us, and you'll go home excited and rewarded for your week away.

In that spirit I identified immediately with this quote I saw on Scott Berkun's blog:

I hate a song that makes you think that you are just born to lose. Bound to lose. No good to nobody. No good for nothing. Because you are too old or too young or too fat or too slim or too ugly or too this or too that. Songs that run you down or poke fun at you on account of your bad luck or hard travelling.

I am out to fight those songs to my very last breath of air and my last drop of blood. I am out to sing songs that will prove to you that this is your world and that if it has hit you pretty hard and knocked you for a dozen loops, no matter what color, what size you are, how you are built, I am out to sing the songs that make you take pride in yourself and in your work.

Scott has a few more paragraphs, and identifies the speaker, so just to make you click over, I'm not going to. I'll give you a hint though: I saw his son just last month, which I suppose is no coincidence.

Kate

I mentioned Andy's blog a few entries ago. Now he is selling some funny shirts to raise money for two deserving charities: one that treats and prevents blindness and another that provides low cost prosthetic feet. Excellent causes.

You know you want one...

Kate

It seems like every year I read about how something we think is new and exciting, or at least fairly recent, has been kicking around for a long time. (I mentioned video games a while back, for example.) Recently on the same day I read a Jeff Atwood blog entry and a Wired article about Ray Ozzie. Here are some quotes:

From Jeff:

From On December 9, 1968, Douglas C. Engelbart and the group of 17 researchers working with him in the Augmentation Research Center at Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, CA, presented a 90-minute live public demonstration of the online system, NLS, they had been working on since 1962. The public presentation was a session in the Fall Joint Computer Conference held at the Convention Center in San Francisco, and it was attended by about 1,000 computer professionals. This was the public debut of the computer mouse. But the mouse was only one of many innovations demonstrated that day, including hypertext, object addressing and dynamic file linking, as well as shared-screen collaboration involving two persons at different sites communicating over a network with audio and video interface.

and from the Wired article, talking about 1973:

Users had direct contact and direct feedback—not just to computers but to one another. "They had this thing called Personal Notes, which you would call email," Ozzie says. "They had this thing called Talkomatic, which is like real-time group chat. And they had this thing called Term-Talk, which was like instant messaging." It was also a way-before-its-time Valhalla of computer gaming. Programmers on the system had gone far beyond the tic-tac-toe and hangman that were popular in other computer centers to pioneer multiplayer online games, notably the Star Trek-inspired Empire. In retrospect, looking at the Plato community was like peeking through a wormhole and viewing the 21st-century Internet—but without the spam, fraud, and commercialism that would come with the real thing 35 years later.

I wonder what technology we're using today that only kinda sorta works and just a few visionaries (eccentrics?) are using it, but 30 or 40 years from now when it's ubiquitous, we'll all be "hey! we had that in 2008! I think I have a screenshot around here somewhere..."

Kate

Rudi Grobler has released a pack of WPF themes for you to use to make your applications convey the atmosphere you want to convey. Applying them is as simple as one line of code in your application as a whole, or window-by-window, or you can do it in XAML.  Rudi's blog tells how. It really makes a difference to the mood of your application and lets you stand out from the crowd.

I shrank the images because people object when the chrome on the right gets messed up by big images. You can see the originals on Rudi's blog - I just want you to see how very different the same application looks when you change themes. BTW, these themes were originally released for Silverlight and Rudi converted them for WPF. Pretty slick!

Kate

Because Visual C++ is a great tool for making Windows applications (and has been for well over a decade) a lot of the Visual C++ users I meet are Koolaid drinkers like myself. We use Microsoft tools to write software for a Microsoft platform, and a fair number of us use Word and Outlook and Powerpoint and rarely touch an application that didn't come from Redmond. But one of the cool things about C++ as a language (contrasted to VB and C# for sure) is that it is also used by people who don't use any Microsoft tools, or who use Visual Studio but nothing else, and people who are not developing for Windows. These people are not drinking the Koolaid and their opinions can be very helpful. They keep track, for example, of which standards features have been implemented in which compilers.

I came across this article on the future of C++, and the article itself didn't have much extra information for me (though the insight into the "bias" of StackOverflow was interesting.) But the comments! Wowza. I'll be reading Andy's blog from now on, and I recommend you read at least this post. It's a good one.

Kate

Soma is blogging about C++ again. I liked this quote:

Over the years, we have heard a lot of C++ developers refer to the old days of Visual C++ 6.0 as the glory days of Visual C++ tools.  Many of the comments reminisce about the snappy and productive IDE.  With Visual C++ 2010, we strive to create a new benchmark for Visual C++ IDE productivity.  We will couple this IDE with our superior support for the C++ language and significant improvements to the libraries.

He talks about Intellisense, the build system, tools for exploring a large codebase, the native Parallel Patterns Library (PPL), lambdas, and MFC updates. There really is a ton going on in Dev10. A lot of it was covered at PDC so if you haven't watched those videos yet:

https://sessions.microsoftpdc.com/public/timeline.aspx search for "C++", "MFC", and "native". Enjoy!

Kate

One very powerful question to ask yourself, if you run a business of any kind, is "what business are you in?" Another way to ask it is "what needs do I meet?". It's easy to say "I'm in the software business" or "I'm in the consulting business" but more people are saying "I hate the way we <something in their business>" than are saying "I wish I had new software" or "I wish I had a consultant."

This Harvard Business School article even says people don't really buy drills, or that isn't the need they are meeting when they go buy a drill - they buy holes. They want holes, and they buy a drill as a way of getting them. The only way you can sell them your drill is to relate it to holes. Being lightweight, for example, doesn't matter to someone who only plans to make a few holes at a time. But it's really important to someone who is going to make a lot of holes and has to slow down the pace because their arm aches from holding the heavy drill. Being cordless only matters if you can think to say "make holes anywhere!" to the purchaser. And so on. The rest of the article helps you try to understand what needs your product or service meets, and therefore how to adjust it or sell it so that you sell more of it.

I've said for years that we're in the problem solving business. We solve people's problems. We're more likely to use software to solve them than to come over to a client's house and build a shed in the backyard or mow the lawn - but we're not so much in the software business as in the problem solving business. If I write great software that doesn't help the problem, I've failed. Often our advice on process is as valuable as the software we write encapsulating that process. And of course when we're mentoring and advising other developers, we need deep technical chops but we need to remember that the mentee or advisee has a problem (our UI looks stale, we have to exchange information with a new business partner and don't know how, our application blows up under certain circumstances and we don't know why) and we are there to get that problem fixed.

As the economy worsens you are more likely to stay in business if you are sure what business you are in. It isn't obvious.

Kate

It's so hard to remember, while you attend a conference, that the convention centre is essentially a blank canvas on which your conference is drawn. Between shows most of the space is a giant empty room with concrete walls and floor. All the lighting, draping, signs, and screens are installed for the show itself - even the chairs are temporary. This amazing timelapse video shows you the keynote room at PDC over the days before, during, and after the show. One of the things I like is that you can see how often the keynotes were rehearsed in the actual room on stage with all the screens going. Full-on dress rehearsals are vital to a good presentation.

It's about 6 minutes long and parts of it are a bit dull (imagine what they would have been like at normal speed) but I'm glad I watched it.

Kate

Recently, as a meeting wrapped up, one of us was taking on an action item to adjust the due dates on a large list of work items. We had gone through the meeting saying "put that for the end of next week" or "put that for middle of next month" and there was a good chance that too much stuff had been put into some of the buckets. He said "I'll go through on a first pass and put the dates as we agreed them, then I'll send them out for everyone to review." Makes sense. He continued, "Once we see them all at once if we need to postpone some, or prepone some, we can." And part of my brain went "prepone? What the -- oh yeah, I get it."

It's quite useful really. People say that "move ahead" and "move forward" are perfectly clear and you can't get confused by them. The problem is, half those people say it's clear that moving forward means to an earlier date and half say it's clear that moving forward means to a later date. Oops.  "Move earlier" is ok, but I quite like prepone. I'm going to see if I can use it with a straight face. BTW I did a quick search, and it's an accepted and generally understood word in South Asian English. I'll see if I can do my part to spread it to the rest of the world.

Kate