I was recently reading a blog called Mini-Microsoft where they were talking about obtaining senior level status at Microsoft. The following is an excerpt that I thought was particularly interesting:

Qualities that a contributor exhibits:

BEGIN ARTICLE QUOTE--------------------------------

·  They can own a room: they aren't warming a seat but rather can take charge of a conversation and represent such a deep level of knowledge that they gain respect for what they say and earn a good reputation. Their focus stays on accountable results and this person can bring resolution and closure together.

·  Expert: They are sought after to be in meetings, for instance, so that good decisions can be made.

·  Results-focused: they are focused on getting great results and don't entwine their ego to particular solutions. They don't get defensive if their ideas are revealed to have flaws but rather delight in being able to move to a better solution.

·  Leadership: pro-active leadership that convinces team members of the future direction and even helps to implement it. This is a big difference between those who can complain about the way things should be and those you can actually bring it about.

·  Solutions, not problems: following up on the above, they aren't complaining about problems on the team but rather implementing and driving solutions.

·  Makes other great: the team benefits and grows from the person's contributions. Answers questions from the team, from support, from customers. Knows what the team delivers backwards and forwards. They are a good mentor.

·  Influence when they can, scare when they must: they have fundamental skills in influencing people, but if they need to flip into junk-yard dog mode, they can. They don't give up and walk away but rather fight when they need to fight, escalating only when needed and with lots of justification.

·  Makes the boss great: if the team and your boss are succeeding because of you, of course you'll be succeeding too.

·  Not doing it for the promotion: if you're out for a promotion, don't do work specifically chose to get the promotion. This is like meeting the Buddha on the road. If you come up with a pretty plan to justify your promotion, you've already lost it. Such plotting is obvious and actually detrimental to your career. If, however, you've determined what it takes to have a successful career in your group at Microsoft and have started what you need to start and stopped what you need to stop, then you're on the right path

END ARTICLE QUOTE-----------------

The qualities above represent what every employer wishes to have in each of its employees. Furthermore, it was every employee should strive for. I am sad to admit that I cannot think of a single person (management or peon), including myself, at my current employer who exemplifies all of these characteristics or at least that exemplifies them well. However, reading this list gives me some perspective and possibly a pivot on which to act to correct myself.

This article also got me thinking about what qualities a true leader should exhibit as it should go hand-in-hand with the above. Entire books have been written on this subject and I’m not going to attempt to replace them here, but here's what I came up with, in no particular order:

1. Focus – A leader needs the ability to stay focused on the important items at hand. Furthermore, they must prioritize and let less pressing items fall back until there is time to address them.

2. Confidence – A leader must have confidence in himself and confidence in his team. If either is lacking then a leader must effect change to build up the necessary confidence.

3. Humility – Despite the need for confidence, the contra-indicator is needed as well. One cannot know everything, and it is important to know when to defer to others who are more knowledgeable or in a better position to answer.

4. Thirst for knowledge – A leader must continually strive to attain knowledge in a variety of areas. This includes duty specific knowledge and social knowledge of team/company/industry.

5. Know when/who/what to delegate  - A leader cannot bear the entire wait by himself. Knowing what your team members are capable of or, more importantly, what they could be capable of if they were given the chance is important.

6. Vision for the future – A leader must know where he is attempting to lead his group to and have a plan for how to get there. Meandering around knocking of tasks as you go, “putting out fires”, is no way to lead. Have a road map, be willing to adjust it, but have it.

7. Ability to clearly and concisely articulate vision – Finally, a leader must be able to transfer his vision to his team, to his customers and back to himself if necessary, effectively with clarity.

Microsoft recently announced a new initiative called Dev Labs. It appears to be essentially equivalent in concept to Google Labs. They post projects they've been working on and claim no responsibility for current or future outcomes (ain't life grand when you can just wash your hands of responsibility?).  

Anyway, one of the inaugural projects is called Pex, and it looks like it could be a helpful utility. I haven't had a chance to use it yet, but would like to give it a try. The requirements look undoable at the moment though as I don't know how to get my hands on Visual Studio 2010 Team. Here's a description of the program:

Pex (Program EXploration) produces a traditional unit test suite with high code coverage. A parameterized unit test is simply a method that takes parameters, calls the code under test, and states assertions. Given a parameterized unit test written in a .NET language, Pex automatically produces a small unit test suite with high code and assertion coverage. To do so, Pex performs a systematic white box program analysis.

Pex learns the program behavior by monitoring execution traces, and uses a constraint solver to produce new test cases with different behavior. At Microsoft, this technique has proven highly effective in testing even an extremely well-tested component.

I am currently reading "More Effective C#: 50 Specific Ways to Improve Your C#" by Bill Wagner and came across an interesting piece of syntax that I have not seen before. Below is an excerpt from the book.

Notice how the cast is used in the using statement. The neat thing here is that even if T doesn't support IDisposable, the code will still work, but if it does the object gets properly disposed off. That's nice!

[Begin Excerpt]

public void GetThingsDone()
{
    T driver = new T();
    using (driver as IDisposable)
    {
        driver.DoWork();
    }
}

This may look a bit confusing if you've never seen that sort of cast in a using statement, but it works. The compiler creates a hidden local variable that stores a reference to the driver cast as an IDisposable. If T does not implement IDisposable, then the value of this local variable is null. In those cases, the compiler does not call Dispose(), because it checks against null before doing this extra work. However, in all cases where T implements IDisposable, the compiler generates a call to the Dispose() method upon exiting the using block.

[End Excerpt]

Ran across this site and thought it was an interesting concept. Throw what you have in the kitchen at it, and it will suggest some recipes that you can make with what you have.

LoveFoodHateWaste

Ran across a couple of tools to help with finding hotspots. I use these when I know I'll be traveling so that I can catch up while I'm on the go.

JiWire

and

AnchorFree

Republished here (from Channel 10) to remind me later:

You know what’s really annoying? When you go to print out something from the web but the site has no “print” button to reformat the website for the printed page. What you usually end up with (if you’re not careful about configuring the options after doing a thorough “print preview”) is a bunch of wasted paper as excess content like ads and page footers end up on separate pages. There should be a better way, don’t you think? Well, there is. A site called PrintWhatYouLike.com lets you simply plugin a URL and then click the parts of the page you want to print. You can also choose to get rid of things like the site’s background, images, or other hand-selected content you choose. In absence of a real print reformatting engine, this is the next best thing.

Need an XPath test application to quickly manipulate your query and see the results? Easy enough to write one of these yourself, but why spend any time on it when someone already has done it has it out there for free? I'm certain there are better ones out there, but here is a link to one on CodePlex that has worked for me in the past: XPath Tester

Microsoft Image Composite Editor is a free tool that is an advanced panoramic image stitcher. You shoot a set of overlapping photographs of a scene from a single location, and Image Composite Editor creates a high-resolution panorama incorporating all your images at full resolution. Then save your stitched panorama in a wide variety of formats, from common formats like JPEG and TIFF to multi-resolution tiled formats.

 I'd like to give this a try at some point. Noting it here for later reference.

Microsoft Pro Photo Tools 2