My first two weeks at Microsoft

Let me just say its been awesome - except for the weather which seems to be taking a good turn now :),  about time I would say.

The best part about working at Microsoft is all the new technology - and the people who created them - I get to experience and see everyday. I could just as easily spend my entire day attending talks as opposed to getting any actual work done - there are so many exciting things to learn. The way the system works is I write out my commitments in consultation with my manager which is used to evaluate my progress. There are no fixed timings for reporting or leaving. I usually get in between 9-10 and stay there till the time my stomach starts complaining about dinner. Aargh - free dinners or at least open cafe’s at night would make things so much easier. I know Google pops into your mind - but seriously I prefer the more technological exposure at Microsoft over free food. In my two weeks here, I got exposed to Windows Server , Hyper-V , PowerShell, Sharepoint apart from experiencing the whole software creation process. Not to say that Google wouldn’t provide it, but for me personally I am more interested in desktop and enterprise computing, rather than the cloud and web 2.0 which are the buzzwords these days.

I did get a peek at the new version of OneNote they are cooking up here. Unfortunately I can’t talk about it but I can’t wait for when I can. There is a lot to talk about Boy, am I excited about it. My commitment or projects for the internship consist of testing one of the new features ( about which I can’t talk) and writing a tool to automate testing about which I can talk :). Basically I am writing some tools that deal with creating and automatically running a testing tool on Virtual Machines(Hyper-V ). This would make it easy for our team to deploy testing solutions to other teams to eliminate problems like OneNote and Windows Home Server corruption issue before they are discovered by users. I am still working on wrapping my head around the tools I need to learn to accomplish this :), and hopefully I’ll get it figured out soon.

That’s all for now :), but if you guys have some feature you are dying to see in OneNote, let me know in the comments and I’ll try my best to influence the PM’s  to think about them.

My First Day at Microsoft

The first day started with dreary weather, a sign of things to follow perhaps. I reported at Building 122 at 8:00 am to take part in the New Employee Orientation. The morning was long and dull as we were made to fill out forms and go through orientation. We were made aware of various Microsoftie things like how to access the network, find HR related information, and watch essential security and legal videos. It should suffice to say that the most interesting and comic part of the entire morning of orientation was a video by one of the lawyers about the law, antitrust and IP protection stuff. Though his humor was obviously unintentional, I think he managed to generate the most laughs by saying things like “It’s bad enough to be a lawyer” with a totally expressionless face. Hmm, any comedians out there wish to comment on whether its a technique to appear unintentionally comic with a totally expressionless face?

After lunch ( notice we hadn’t yet left the single room we were in - from 8:00 - 1:30) we split up into teams and were sent off on a scavenger hunt. While the idea itself was good, in my opinion it was a failure as none of us had keycards to get in into any of the buildings, nor did anyone know even vaguely what the questions referred to. It was more like a battle between the group leaders (Microsoft workers who volunteered) rather than the tour of campus or a team building exercise which I think they intended it to be.

However I do realize that most of the stuff we did had to be done and considering that they get a batch of interns (around 100 in mine) every week, they couldn’t really do anything special like getting a high exec.to give a talk etc., but they sure could have tried to liven things up a little.

Then after that around 4:00  I met with John (my manager) and the rest of the Test Team. It was really thrilling to meet some of the people behind the product and my mentor (my go -to person )  helped me set up my office station and email etc. They gave me 2 desktop computers and a screamer of a Gateway tablet . She walked me through a few things but since I did not have full network access yet  looking at the actual tools was put off. Probably a nice thing, because a mixture of the boring morning and jet lag had made me really tired and sleepy. After checking my mail ( Yes I already had around 25 of them !! )  I called it a day.

Today, on the other hand is projected to be a sunny day, and I am looking forward to my first day in office.

OneNote Favorites in Full Screen

I am always looking for ways to quickly find information. Users of EverNote are familiar with the tagging system, where you apply tags - homework, physics, computers - etc. to notes. That way you can look at notes, categorized according to these tags. This can complement the existing structure of notebooks/section groups especially when you have pages across notebooks, sections and pages.

Bring in the OneNote tags feature. It is one of those features which hold the potential to change the way you use OneNote. If you use OneNote to collect data, the tagging feature can make it a snap to find it again, and is specially helpful for review work. More on that later.

Jeff has a wonderful write up on how to use tagging in OneNote. I recommend reading that here if you are unaware of this feature. Now to create easily accessible favorites, create tags with which you want to classify your favorites, or simply create a tag called favorites. Now go to the page title and add the tags to your page. It will look something like this

 

Now to view pages tagged with favorites, call up the tags summary ( accessible in full screen mode) option.

In the tags summary pane you can view all your favorite pages under the favorites tag. You also have a bunch of sorting options ranging from viewing only the current notebook to viewing recently tagged notes.

Thus tagging pages with these tags, in combination with the tags summary pane can provide an easy way to create favorite pages, which are easily accessible in the full screen mode.

This feature is also very useful for reviewing notes, but a more detailed write-up on that later.

OneNote : Moving things in OneNote

Picking up on John’s post on using OneNote in the classroom, I realized that class notes need a lot of restructuring. I thought i’ll share the technique I use to move things around in OneNote. OneNote is great for moving around text in containers, however it doesn’t always behave so well when moving ink. A technique I often use to move things around is a combination of zoom and the lasso tool. The lasso tools allows me to select exactly the things I want to move - meaning I can move graphs and associated text together; while the zoom in function shows me exactly how the placement is going to affect other text.

Quick Tip : The right click button on the pen is mapped to the lasso tool by default I think, hence you can quickly move things around with the lasso tool even as you take notes . Lasso is also very handy to delete large portions of text.

View at 75% Zoom ( my normal writing setting)

At 25% I can see a larger portion of the page ; hence making it easier to move things around. I can even select multiple things and move them at once

It takes a little practice to use the lasso tool if you haven’t used it before, but once you get the hang of it, it is much quicker.

Interviewing with Microsoft : Part 2 - The Butterflies Period

After I got the interview call, I felt butterflies in my stomach. Literally my stomach was churning. I was excited, true, but I had no idea what to expect. Google search revealed lots of question, which ranged from easy to outright impossible. I had not programmed in C++ for over 2 years, C# was a relatively new language and I was yet to take a formal Algorithms course. To top it I was interviewing for a position in Test - and I had no idea about the formal way to test. I had just learnt that something called Unit Tests existed. Most of my knowledge was on a need to know basis. It’s actually a simple concept I follow to learn.

Step 1: Decide on a project. No matter how absurd it seems, you need to have a fundamental belief that you can make it work.

Step 2: Get excited about it for 2-3 days. Think in very abstract terms (plain English) how it can be achieved. If at the end of the 3 day period I still have the same excitement, then I know that I can make the project happen. It is vital to wait for 2-3 days so as not to have too many abandoned projects. Of 10-12 ideas I generate, at the end of the wait period only 1-2 seem to be manageable and implemental. So for example, for the DoubleHyperlink project I broke it down as

1) I create a new page - Simple I knew how do that.

2) Create Hyperlink to that New Page - Again relatively simple using the API.

3) Insert Hyperlink at the Current Cursor Position - I didn’t know how to do this when I started.

4) Browse to new page - Again relatively simple.

As a rule of thumb, if there are more than 5 abstract concepts I need to figure out - I drop the project. Note : Most of my projects are 2-3 weeks timeframe projects with a full course load of classes. So I don’t want anything too big on my plate.

Step 3: Now I have the basic idea of how to achieve my goal. I just need to gather the knowledge. So I need to figure out how to insert at the Current Cursor Location. This is basically the bottleneck in my project. So my goal is narrowed to one single thing - learn how to insert text at the current location in OneNote. At this stage I break it to more fundamental steps. How can I achieve this, since there is no API to do this. After some though I decided that copy-paste would be the simplest thing. So what I need to do is put the hyperlink on the Clipboard and then Paste it into OneNote. So the whole project was broken down into learning how to handle the clipboard. I googled Windows Clipboard management and spent some time learning the syntax and basics behind how the Clipboard works. Equipped with this knowledge I was ready to embark on my major project.

So back to the main point. My entire knowledge is haphazard, with no structure and I felt totally unprepared to take a technical interview without google at my disposal. I had a week before my Interview date. I was panicking. At this point, of the various people I talked to, the best advice was from John (yes he was the one who “noticed” me) which I will quote below

“The only tip I have is relax. Think of writing and testing your code, and then just do it.No pressure.” - Thanks John

Although it seems too simple and obvious - I’ll advice everyone interviewing to repeat this mantra 10 times a day. You’ve gotten this far; You know your stuff - and you can’t really do much in a week’s time in terms of increasing your knowledge. I did review some C++ - pointers , linked lists and trees - which seemed to be popular according to Google. And yes I did freak out a little when I read questions which seemed totally beyond my grasp. The only thing I recommend practicing is the WhiteBoard question. Don’t do it alone. Get a professor ( if you can) or a friend to give you a mock interview. Practice thinking out aloud. Trust me, you don’t want your first experience to be in front of an interviewer. The first time I did it ( with my prof.) I was totally tounge-tied - specially after I stumbled. Don’t stress over knowing deep issues like the difference between a class and struct. They aren’t looking at what you know. They are looking for how fast can they teach you. This was of course only clear to me after the interview. As for the actual interview - well you’ll have to wait a few more days for that one !!