As has already been reported many times, Microsoft is giving each of its 80,000 employees a Windows Phone 7 device at launch.  As a long time Windows Mobile user (and Pocket PC Phone, Pocket PC and Palm-Sized PC user – man has this technology had a lot of names) I’m excited to see Microsoft aggressively re-entering the phone space.  I hope it can compete with the iPhone and Android phones and from what I’ve seen of devices and read in early reviews, Windows Phone will be strong competition.

A question on many peoples’ minds is what Microsoft is going to do about the 14,000 or so iPhones that are currently connected to its corporate Exchange servers.  Some of more excited and proud Microsoft folks have suggested that Microsoft IT should no longer allow iPhones to be connected.  After all, we’ll all be carrying superior Windows Phones, right?  I believe disconnecting this crowd would be a massive mistake.  The iPhone-carrying folks at Microsoft are a huge asset to Windows Phone’s product planning team.  Six months after this deployment of free Windows Phones, how many of those 14,000 iPhones are still actively connected to the corporate network?  If I were a product planner on the Windows Phone team I’d find the opinions of these employees hugely valuable.  I’d survey them.  I’d work with them to deeply understand their attachment to their iPhone.  Then I’d apply what I learned to Windows Phone 8 and repeat the whole cycle again and again until that 14,000 number dropped to zero.

What do you think Microsoft will do?

I’m going to start a new series of posts titled, “Things That Make My Life Hell”.  The goal of these posts isn’t to explain to you why you should be glad you’re not me.  No, the goal is to pick some of the harder, messier problems I’ve had to deal with and explain how I solved them.  That way, should you ever have the misfortune of facing the same problems, hopefully you’ll be armed with a solution.

For today’s misfortune I’d like to focus on .NET app domains. More...

The VS 2010 RC has a serious bug that causes crashes when editing text.  The VS team has released a patch for it here: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/KB980610.  Karl's also posted this on The Cider Blog.

It’s been a long time since this blog has seen any posts about Cider.  I haven’t been sleeping.  Instead, I’ve been tuning.  For the last six months I’ve been heads down focusing on the performance of Cider in VS 2010 both for WPF and for Silverlight.  ScottGu’s post about creating another public release candidate hopefully has you convinced that we’re very serious about ensuring that the performance of the product meets your expectations.  I thought it would be helpful if I talked about some of the specific things we’ve done in Cider to help with performance.

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There's a lot of cool stuff coming in Silverlight 4. Here's a couple of interesting links to get you started:

• Silverlight 4 Beta Page
• Tim Heuer's summary of the release, which has lots of info on features, tool support, etc.

And of course, if you're brave enough to be running VS 2010 Beta2, you can download the Silverlight 4 Tools Update that gives you full VS 2010 / Cider support.