Me: I live in Silicon Valley with my wife, child and cat. I have worked at Microsoft since I graduated from College, mostly in the Macintosh Business Unit on products such as Outlook Express, Entourage, IE, and Virtual PC. I am currently a Senior Lead Program Manager on the Windows Live Hotmail Frontdoor team. I basically manage a team of Program Managers responsible for the User Interface of Hotmail as well as some of the Infrastructure and Architecture. I've been blogging since 2001 and like to play around with .NET in my spare time working on projects such as dasBlog (the blog that powers this site) and Send to SmugMug (an application for uploading photos to SmugMug). I blog about a number of technology and productivity related topics.
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© Copyright 2008, Omar Shahine
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FireAnt is a big deal for me. It’s the code name for the “plumbing” of Kahuna, the Hotmail Frontdoor rewrite. It’s one of the “Architecture” pieces that my team is responsible for helping build.
Last summer we spent a lot of time at the white-board evaluating a number of ways to deliver a new architecture for Hotmail. We considered a number of things:
After much deliberating, we chose #3, and started running. For 4 weeks basically 1 PM, a developer and an intern built a prototype, and then the real thing (in case you are in college I’d note how cool it is that we put an intern on the most important technology we we're building). As more people started to move over to the FireAnt project, we got more and more excited about what was happening. You see, writing AJAX code can be a pain, and we didn’t want to spend our days and nights writing a lot of JavaScript and debugging client side Script. Instead we built an infrastructure that dynamically take server side objects (classes and methods) and automatically generates client side JavaScript stubs. The end result is that the client side object model looked exactly like the server side object model. Information was transported across the wire using XMLHTTP and the whole thing happened Asynchronously.
We extended .NET Attributes to mark classes and methods as FireAnt classes/methods and at build time the script is generated. If you think of SOAP support in the .NET Framework, it’s basically similar. As a developer you do not worry about generating SOAP messages, or building a SOAP parser. All you do is mark your method as [WebMethod] and your classes as [Serializable] and the .NET framework takes care of proxying, class generation etc. That’s what we were shooting for.
This was a big deal for us as it allows us to be incredibly productive. Since last summer, we have built a ton of features using FireAnt and the JavaScript Frameworks from Scott Isaacs. Late last fall we went up to Redmond and showed FireAnt to a number of folks in MSN, one of those folks was Steve Rider. It was really exciting to see the looks on folks faces when Walter (our FireAnt “architect”) setup his “Hello World” demo. You could just see that people realized that doing AJAX style development any other way was crazy.
We’ve since showed our stuff to a number of teams inside Microsoft. As a result of our work, Walter and Scott have spent a considerable amount of time with the Whidbey/ASP.NET folks and it’s pretty exciting to see ATLAS come together. If you want to learn more, Walter will be giving a talk at the PDC on what we’ve built. It’s great so see collaboration between our team and the Developer Division as the end result will be a better more scalable version of the .NET Framework for you.
We also just wrapped up another Channel 9 video, with more folks than the last one. It should be a great video when Robert is done editing it.