Here in the developer platform product management team, we have kicked off a new campaign about the .NET Framework.  There are so many people doing so many amazing things with .NET, and we want to hear from you.  The site linked to above has stories from some of our customers doing some very unexpected things with the .NET Framework.

Those stories were submitted by our field, but now we’re asking you directly.  Are you a .NET developer?  Have you done something cool you want the world to know about?  Great, come share your story and get featured on the wall of fame.  Free traffic and visibility is never a bad thing.

For those of you willing to create a demo of your product using DemoMate from Impresys, you could win a car or a 12-day Galapagos Islands trip.  You heard me…Bob Barker says “come on down!”  We’re looking for interesting and unique solutions build on top of our stack.  Bonus points if you interop with non-MSFT technologies.  We have a distinguished panel of judges who will select the winner.

Last, if you are going to be at PDC, come to our party.  We’re working in conjunction with the great guys at .NET Rocks (who, incidentally, have a great dev focused podcast) to throw a party at 8pm in the Visual Studio/.NET Lounge Theater.  Free food, drinks, prizes…good times to be had by all.

In an effort to bolster the economy one job at a time, I have a position on my team that I need to fill.  We’re looking for smart, capable people who know how to get shit done, and have fun doing it.  You must have a passionate desire to make the lives of developers easier, and help get our products to market, and make them the best option for developers.  If you know anyone who might fit the bill, let me know.  If I hire someone you refer, I will personally get you a copy of Windows7 (when it ships of course).

Standard Job Title: Product Manager

Job Category: Marketing

Product: Developer Platforms

Division: Server & Tools Business

This week I have been spending time at a corporate offsite.  It’s been a pretty amazing experience, and I have seen/learned a ton of things about which I cannot speak.  That’s a bummer, because I was blown away by some of the stuff I have seen, but it’s internal only for now.  However, should you want to see some of this stuff, you might want to consider being at our Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles in a couple of weeks.

That said, one thing I can share is a story from a partner.  The presenter was awesome, and shared some interesting pivots on things that his company was doing with data.  It wasn’t data, but rather how they approached their customer support that really inspired me.  To make his point, he showed us a video of a storm chaser – the implicit statement was that for anyone who has ever been on a call with a Fortune100 customer when the service offering goes down, it was very much like being a storm chaser.  Just about the scariest thing you can do.  I would argue that it’s not the scariest environment imaginable, but that’s just me.

In order to think through how they were going to tackle customer support on a go-forward basis they decided that they would talk to the experts.  They arranged meetings with firefighters and emergency & disaster site workers.  They wanted to get into the heads of the very people who have to manage the crisis, calm the locals, and solve the problem.  How ingenious!

I don’t want to give away too much of what they shared, but I will share this tid-bit.  The best plan of action for learning how to handle support of irate, and expensive-to-lose customers?  Drill often.  Think about that for a minute.  How often do you drill your customer support team?  This reminds me of the movie Apollo 13, when Jack Swigert is getting a run in the simulator and blows it, and Lovell makes a joke along the lines of “if I had a nickel for every time I was killed in the simulator.”  The point here is that if you drill for it, you can solve the crisis when it arises with calm and focused effort.

What are you doing to train and audit your customer support?

I ran into an interesting bug this past wee when trying to install the beta 2 build of Visual Studio 2010.  I tried both the web bootstrap install and the full ISO download.  I also tried the Ultimate version as well as Professional.  Nothing seemed to be working.

It turns out that my machine configuration was the problem.  I am running a MacBook Pro for my personal dev machine, mostly so that I can dabble in multiple languages on multiple platforms.  I am using Boot Camp to run Windows 7.  My Windows partition is smaller than the Boot Camp partition.  In this case the .NET 4 Framework installer fails, and this is because it is trying to unpack to the largest fixed disk drive, and it doesn’t fail gracefully if that isn’t writeable.  The Microsoft Connect site has a post on this issue.

The workaround posted is to remove the drive letter from the OS X volume.  That works, but I wanted to offer up a different solution which may have longer term benefits for users who dual boot like myself.  I discovered MacDrive, and it’s a driver which allows Windows to write to an OS X volume.  Small download, and it has a free trial period.  Problem solved in about 1 minute.  You can uninstall the driver when you are done installing or upgrade.

According to the dev team, this bug has already been fixed, but it isn’t in the beta 2 build.

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;

namespace ScottHanselman
{
    public class HanselmanEffect
    {
        public int twitterClicks {get; set;}

        public HanselmanEffect(int minutesSinceTweet)
        {
            twitterClicks = 50;

            if (minutesSinceTweet >= 10)
            {
                minutesSinceTweet = 10;
            }

            Console.WriteLine("You should have {0} clicks",

                _(twitterClicks*minutesSinceTweet));

        }
    }
}

For the nerds out there.   Yes, there should be some form of degradation on this function, but you get the idea.

About 3 weeks ago, I wrote this article about the Kindle, and mentioned how I thought that for various reasons attached to the Kindle, I was actually going to be reading more.

Shortly thereafter, I got a ping on Facebook from someone I didn’t know.  His name is Brad Stone, and he identified himself as a journalist and he had some questions about my blog post.  I rang him up, and we spoke for a while.  In today’s NY Times is the article he was writing.

The point in sharing this is (aside for a shameless plug, and an attempt to get people to say “awwwwww” about my daughter) to underscore how very important social media is becoming, and how it has the ability to make things happen, quickly.  I am sure that social networks are allowing journalists to identify source material in a much more efficient way than ever before.  However, more interestingly, is the how quickly the turnaround happened from when I wrote the post to when Brad contacted me.

As part of a mini-campaign I am kicking off at the San Francisco StackOverflow Dev Days, I am upgrading any developer’s laptop to 2×2GB of RAM.  I really wanted to have some 2×4GB kits, but those were a bit out of the price range.  I am here all day – the guy in the bright orange shirt.  We will be doing a second act of this at the Seattle Dev Days, so if you are coming to the Seattle event, bring your laptop.

Why are we doing this?  Because every developer deserves more memory.  I don’t care if you are on a MacBook.  Running Ubuntu.  Using Eclipse.  Targeting MySQL.  It. Don’t. Matter.  Come see me and we will get you developing faster, because RAM makes everything better.

Love to see that people here appreciate what we’re doing. (Search Twitter)

Now that I am back as insider at Microsoft, I guess it would be uncool of me to poke fun at the length of the names that we have to squeeze in to our headlines for product releases.  Nothing will ever top my personal favorite “Windows Live One Care Family Safety Settings Beta."  Yeah, that happened.

Awesomeness ensues for MSDN subscribers who can download the beta bits on Oct 19th, and general availability will come on the 21st.  For those of you who want to wait until the product is formally released before you go play with it, you now know that you get to wait until Mar 22nd, 2010.  I prefer to get a head start with new bits.  I was an intern when we released Windows 95 beta, and had all 21 floppy disks from the building 17 receptionist.

The Visual Studio team is also kicking off their Ultimate Offer.  What is it?  A pretty cool program meant to give you, the developer, more free shit.  Free shit is never bad, but this is quite a stack of stuff. 

As one of the people who cares very deeply about our developer platforms, the release of Beta 2 is a huge deal.  No matter what type of application you want to build, .NET can help you get started.  If you stop and think about that for a second, it’s pretty amazing.  Your speed to solution is greatly improved by having so many building blocks available to you, but where the framework really shines is allowing .NET developers to take one set of skills and apply them to any of the UX experiences presented by the web, client, server, mobile, or even XBox/Zune.

As part of reaching out to the development community, we are kicking off a campaign meant to highlight some amazing stories of developers doing some pretty unexpected things with .NET.  In gathering personas for this campaign, I have had the pleasure of learning about some pretty awesome uses of .NET.  For sure, check out the stories, but also head over and share your own stories.

One of my favorite VC bloggers, Josh Kopelman, has an interesting piece on the VC math problem as first envisioned by Fred Wilson.  Having gone through the fund raising process, and hearing this nonsense from VCs, I always gnashed my teeth when a VC was setting valuations based on what they needed to own.  Not any intrinsic value of the business, but rather what they felt their ownership percentage needed to be.  This was much more of a problem with the earlier stage VCs, and, interestingly enough, with some of the spray and pray VCs, where you would think they might care less about overall percentage due to the fact that they were investing everywhere.

Josh references a paper by Paul Kedrosky which takes a very detailed research approach to examining this issue.  The paper has been downloaded and will be read tonight.  However, the math that blew my mind was contained in the following section of Josh’s post:

Take a $400M venture fund.  In order to get a 20% return in 6 years, they need to triple the fund — or return $1.2B.  Add in fees/carry and you now have to return $1.5B.  Assuming that the fund owns 20% of their portfolio companies on exit, they need to create $7.5B of market value.  So assume that one VC invested in Skype, Myspace and Youtube in the same fund – they would be just halfway to their goal.

My head just exploded.  Despite my own please for my co-workers to be more intellectually curious with their jobs, I had never done this math.  I am left absolutely shaking my head at the reality that is facing any VC not in the top 5 (as in top 5 VCs, not 5%).  Good luck.  The tactical play for a fund is to invest early and small.  This is at odds with the 2 and 20 model.  I mean how are VCs going to feed their Cayenne Turbos?

Worse, I worry about the companies that the other VCs are funding.  With such a challenging economic model now staring them in the face (hey, at least before they didn’t have to answer to the data which could refute ridiculous forward looking statements about future “internet” or “new economy” fund performance), are they going to just start swinging for the fences?  Will they just pile on the risk and do whatever they can to justify the fees?  Or will they find a way to raise money and do next to nothing, and simply collect their management fees?  I wonder if LPs will now start wanting to have claw-back mechanisms in place when returns fall below a certain threshold.

The really hard problem facing entrepreneurs is that while it costs less and less money to start a company, VCs have more and more money piling up in the form of capital call commitments due to a dearth of deals over the past couple of years.  They want to deploy more capital, and that leads to capital inefficiency within small companies.

I am going to go on record here and claim that 2010 will see the rapid and inexorable decline of the popularity of the Netbook.  I have been using a Netbook for more than 6 months, and using it with Windows 7.  I finally gave up on my Lenovo S10 with 2GB of RAM.

While there have been scores of articles breathlessly extolling the coming panacea brought to you by Netbooks, I am calling bullshit, and in fact going to make the claim that the Netbooks will suffer the same fate as the Razor scooter.  In fact, for the true nerds, let’s do a cast:

netbook = (2009)razorscooter;

For those of you too young to remember when the Razor first came on the hipster scene, it was back in the late 90s, and could easily be used as a sign of dot com excess.  Everyone, it seemed, had one of these things, and yet no one, it seemed, was actually riding them.  People carried them around, or you had them in offices (for what purpose I don’t know, but I do know I was scooting to a meeting for which I was late when I saw my future wife sitting in the lobby of my dot com job).  Everyone had to have one of these things.  Then, just as quickly as they appeared, they largely disappeared from that scene.  Sure, you still see them around, and they are certainly for sale, but there’s no flash there.  The cool factor was gone once the lack of utility settled in.

The same fate awaits the netbook.  Let’s start with the issues.  I don’t care what people say about the use cases, the screen resolution for me, is the single biggest limiting factor for netbooks.  I suppose you can blame Microsoft and the new Ribbon UI element, but screen real estate is at a super premium on these netbooks.  I found that there were Flash ads which were designed to be 600 pixels high, and because of toolbars and what not in my browser, the “close window” text for the ad was below the fold, and the ad scrolled with the page.  Ugh!

Second, the Atom processor is not a suitable option for productivity software.  If you do anything remotely resembling serious browsing (more than a few tabs open) or have Outlook + a large PST file, forget about bringing your computer out from sleepy time.  Anytime I opened my machine and Outlook went to synch, the pain and suffering was acute.  Even worse if you hadn’t opened the machine for a day or so and had a bunch of meeting reminders pop up.  I also found that if I had 2 Office apps open, the context switching was sometimes painful.

Lastly, and this is the one that really irks me, the battery life was awful.  For such a small machine, and wimpy processor, the default battery would last 2 hours at most.  Not even enough for 2 meetings without having to travel with the power brick.  I borrowed someone’s 6 cell battery, and that made it marginally more tolerable.  When you think about how long a batter on the new MacBook Pro 13” lasts, the 2 pound trade off for the MBP is well worth the extra 5 hours of battery life.  Plus the bigger screen.  Yes, it’s more expensive, but I think the $300 price point isn’t going to be enough once people use these machines more and more, and come to realize their many shortcomings.

Ultimately I believe people was smaller/lighter form factors, but will grow tired of the toy factor.  You can get a decent laptop for $600.  I am not sure what market space the netbook ultimately occupies.