Me: I live in Silicon Valley with my wife, child and cat. I have worked at Microsoft since I graduated from College, both in the Macintosh Business Unit on products such as Outlook Express, Entourage, IE, and Virtual PC and in Windows Live on Hotmail, Calendar and People. I am currently a Principal Lead Program Manager on the Windows Live Social Networking team. I basically manage a team of Program Managers responsible for delivering features to support our web and client applications. 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 2010, Omar Shahine
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One of the cool things about PDC is that you get to meet interesting people, who in turn show you cool things. Today, while doing some e-mail I met Mark Colburn. He showed me a cool Refactoring tool called Refactory.
How many times have you quickly whipped up a form, and left all the names of the controls the defaults like “Label1”, etc? To change these things later on is a complex search and replace and then usually a lot of clean-up because your search and replace was either too aggressive, or not aggressive enough. This takes care of that.
Also, while talking to him I was complaining that there is no good Diff tool in VS.NET. WinDiff isn’t very good, and I’m using a program called Compare and Merge which offers a decent visual view of file and folder diffs. Anyway, the Program Manager of the Longhorn SDK was sitting right next to me and overheard this. She gave me her card and told me to send her that feedback! Cool. I showed her Compare and Merge to give her an idea of what I expect to be part of the platform.
Finally, he pointed me to http://www.refactoring.com/ which has some great resource and a good book by Martin Fowler that he recommended I get.
update: seems that Whidbey will offer most of these features. Man I can't wait till I can switch over, but that while be a while.