Visual Studio Cannot Enumerate Resources in the Executable
Ever get the following error message when opening a PE file?
Turns out that if you have custom resource types, the names of the resources in that type cannot be lower case.
As you see in this example, my resources begin with an upper case P. Visual Studio will cry if you embed these resources with a lower case P.
Thank you, Visual Studio, for making my work week that much longer…
The Fashion Police Have Arrived
In an off the wall post for my blog – it appears that a small suburb of Chicago has banned baggy pants. In short, you cannot show more than 3” of underwear otherwise you get a $25 ticket.
I personally don’t wear my pants that baggy, but it does raise quite a few questions. What is considered underwear? Some people may wear gym shorts instead of underwear – are they allowed to show 3” of gym shorts? What about those that choose to go commando – can they show 3” of crack?
What about other fashions that “keep major retailers and economic development away”? I for sure wouldn’t want to open a business if people dressed like furries… or even Paris Hilton.
What about times of the year where it may even be encouraged to wear baggy pants, such as breakfast club or Halloween?
I think they have gone down a slippery slope which may get them into hot water.
Just after my move to Seattle, my Indiana license plates expired which has left me without a car. Although an awesome benefit from Microsoft is a free bus pass, they also have this amazing bus that picks you up and takes you to work every day called The Connector. It has been over two weeks now since I have been riding it every day, and while it’s not as convenient as driving my car, it’s good enough for me not to make getting my plates a priority.
For perspective, I ride the Queen Anne / Belltown bus, getting on at 1st and Wall.
In order to ride the connector, you must schedule the time for it to pick you up and drop you off. This can be a bummer at times for two reasons. The first is that you must remember to schedule your bus ride, and most of the “best times” (i.e. not departing at 6:45am or leaving at 7:00pm) are going to be taken by the time you actually remember to schedule it. The second reason is that although you don’t need a reservation, you will most likely be able to ride the bus if you don’t sign up. There have only been two times that I have seen people denied access due to not having a reservation.
The ride is fairly nice. This isn’t any luxury vehicle you are riding, but it’s not a school bus either. The seats are comfortable but the ride can get a little bumpy at times. There is free Wi-Fi on the bus, so you can actually do some of your work while you ride the bus. Another option that I tend is to read that book that I never have time for.
The traffic in Seattle isn’t as bad as Chicago, but crossing 520 isn’t a breeze without being in the car pool lane. So any time that I save by driving my car is quickly negated by having to wait in the stop and go traffic. From the time I walk out of my office to the time I walk into my building is about the same weather I drive to work or take the bus.
Grechen over at Microsoft’s JobsBlog just posted the stops that The Connector takes, so feel free to take a look at those. I know that this information would have been helpful as nobody seemed to know the exact routes that it took.
It is currently a little over a month into my full time employment at Microsoft, and I am extremely pleased with everything that I am working on. For those that don’t know yet, I work on the installer for the Windows Live team.
I am going to go out on a limb and say that what I enjoy the most at Microsoft are the fringe benefits. This includes things such as a laid back atmosphere (I wear a t-shirt and jeans every day), free soft drinks (Coke AND Pepsi products, though I usually drink milk or juice), riding the connector, awesome club membership, and people who are much, much brighter than I am.
Another “benefit” is that I now get to be on the “inside” of everything that’s going on at Microsoft. I have already been given a demo of Windows 7 (WAY more than just a new touch screen) and I have daily builds of every Windows Live application available (Live Writer is sweet).
Although I can’t discuss details of everything that I work on, I can say that I learn so many new things every day. My first day at work, my mentor and boss gave me a set of books to get me familiar with what types of things I will work on.
Those are just the books that I got on my first day – more have arrived and more are on order. Needless to say, I probably don’t have an excuse for not being busy 
.
My day-to-day work consists of Win32 (obviously)/C++/COM work, which before I started I had no experience. After digging my heels in for a month and wondering around a forest of code, I have made some clearings and know a few different pieces of a lot of code.
One aspect of working at Microsoft that I have enjoyed so far is that I have gotten to be in control of what I am doing, and people trust me to complete my assignments. This is obviously a scary feeling when I dig into a bug, or adding new functionality in an area of code I haven’t even looked at, but up to this point I have managed to not hose the build system too terribly.
About the only thing I am not enjoying are some of the tools we have to use. I have always been a Subversion or Mercurial guy, and the version control we use just doesn’t cut it. From looking at the commands, there are sometimes three commands that do the same thing, just slightly differently. Why create a whole new command when a flag would do? I am already thinking about making Mercurial manage Source Depot.
Each team around here is scrambling to finish the current milestone (most teams it’s this week with others next week), which has given me an opportunity to see a coding milestone from start to finish. The race has been interesting and has kept me on my toes. I look forward to my continuing adventures at Microsoft.