The last time i posted a “what i work on” was almost exactly 2 years ago.  And you know what?  I’m working on the same thing: workbooks!  but Workbooks has changed a ton since that last post.

Two years later…so much has changed!

Wait, first things first: what is "workbooks"?

A workbook is a canvas.  The author can put all kinds of things in it that query data from various Azure data sources, present that data in interesting ways, arrange the layout to their liking, and configure how users can interact with them.

Recently, I’ve been working on Usage features for Application Insights in the Azure Portal.  Our new usage features are still in preview mode, and include Users, Sessions, Events and Retention tools.  A person would normally use them to look at how users use their websites or app, what they click on, how often they come back, etc.

Users Tool

The users/sessions/events tools are very similar, showing you charts and grids and such about how users are using your website or app.  You can filter and slice and dice and split, and save them and share them and pin them to dashboards and everything.  (when you save them and pin them to the dashboard, they’ll show you a count matching your filters, so it’s possible to make a bunch of tiles on a dashboard that are like daily/weekly/monthly users of subsets of your site/app)

After a long run, Asheron’s call has finally shut down for good. As such, I’ve also shut down the data processing for the 2 related site’s I’ve run for ~15 years:  TrophyHunter and PKHunter.  Here’s a post about statistics, info, and details about PKHunter.  At some point i might do a similar post about TrophyHunter.  There’s a little less stats involved there, but the final kill map looks a lot more like Dereth than the PK-only kill map

For a while, I’d been looking at options for a “small” lift for my jeep.  Nowadays, there are an infinite amount of options, from leveling kits, to suspension lifts, to body lifts, offered by tons of different vendors.  After setting a budget and evaluating all my options, I’d eventually settled on something.  And then a post on wranglerforum.com changed my mind.

MetalCloak adopts the “Gold Standard”

Every once in a while, MetalCloak has done this special package where if you pay with 1 ounce of gold, they’ll sell you a 2.5” – 3.5” lift kit at a pretty good discount and give you free shipping.

In a random ad email from Extreme Terrain, i saw a star grill insert, and had an idea to go with the theme of my jeep. I thought: "We have red and blue spray paint..."

So i ordered one, and busted out the masking tape…

Can you see my silly mistake in masking?  i see saw it as soon as i finished spraying.  You’ll see it in a second when the masking tape is removed… :|

Every once in a while, you run into one of those problems while debugging where you just don’t get what’s going on.  you’ve stepped through the debugger 10 times, and you see it happening, but you just don’t know why.

I ran into one of those a few weeks back, while porting one of my apps to windows 10, where sometimes, when you clicked the back button, nothing would happen.  if you clicked it a second time, it went back to the page you were on.  And when this state was occurring, there were some other strange things going on that weren’t quite right.  I’d been stepping through it over and over, and i got to a place where the same breakpoint was getting hit 2 times, with the same stack when i navigated to the page in the first place.  This seemed like a very strange thing.  i couldn’t for the life of me figure out how that was possible. did i find some strange subtle bug in the Win10 UWP framework?  I figured that to be highly unlikely, i was certainly doing something subtle myself.  So i thought, “Hey, self, you used to work on debuggermap, i wonder if there’s something i’m not seeing here..”

It was announced this morning that what used to be Windows Live Writer has been forked, modified, and open sourced under a MIT license as Open Live Writer. Prior to Facebook, i used to post a lot more stuff here on my blog, and when i did, i did most of that posting using WLW. Microsoft stopped actively developing it after the Windows Live Writer 2012 release and most of that team was moved to working on making apps for Windows 8. I still used WLW after that, but slowly over time the plug-ins i used stopped being supported, and it became a little bit harder to use. And Facebook made it easy to post little things, and life always has a way of finding other things to do. I always mean to post more stuff here, and i probably have 10 or more unfinished drafts either as WLW .wpost files, or saved as drafts in WordPress.

I randomly got Deadpool for xbox 360 from my gamefly.com queue. I have no idea when I added it, I’m presuming a long time ago since this game was released more than 2 years ago.  But it finally came up to the top of the queue, so I played it.  Went in with low expectations, since it was so old…

It was hilariously awesome…for adults!

My kids love Deadpool in the Lego: Marvel Superheroes game; he has lots of funny animations, and quips like “I’m not dead.  I don’t have a pool.”, and so my children will just say that, for no reason at all while playing.  But there’s no way I would ever let them see me playing this game.  It is brutally violent, has tons of swearing, and lots of sexual innuendos, hence the Mature 17+ rating.  Playing this game made me super excited for the upcoming movie with Ryan Reynolds!

Simply stated: Dragon Age: Inquisition is the best game I’ve played in a long, long time. It was so good, that now that I’ve finished, (twice! After I finished the first time, I loaded a save from several days prior and did several companion quests, finished up some loose ends, and finished the main storyline a different way), I am kindof on a Dragon Age hangover.  I really just haven’t been in the mood to play anything. Since I’m not in the mood to play, I figure I better write about it!

Almost a decade ago, I posted my original review of my springfield 1911.  Over the years, little mods have taken place, like different grips, a different magwell, etc.  The newest piece is a modification to the gun to enable an addition.  I replaced the standard barrel with a threaded storm lake barrel, so that I could attach a suppressor!  And yes, silencers are legal!

Way back when the XBox 360 came out (2006!), I did a review of Dead Rising.  It was  a great game, one of my favorites of that first generation of 360 games.  When Dead Rising 2 came out in 2010, it was lost in a sea of other games, so I never ended up playing it.  I did play through part of their free “preview” game, Dead Rising: Case Zero, but I never finished that either… When the Xbox One released a few months ago, Dead Rising 3 was one of the launch titles.  I didn’t buy an Xbox One right away, instead I waited for the holiday drama to subside, and watched for people selling consoles they might have bought only to flip to people that were desperate for one during the holidays.  And indeed, I did get a great deal on a bundle with an extra controller, Dead Rising 3, and Lego Marvel.

I’ve had a Surface since they originally came out.  I bought a day one Surface RT of my own, and used it all the time.  I really liked the idea of the surface pro, but since it had like half the battery life of the RT, at like twice the expense.  But when the surface pro 2 was announced, it was with a much more efficient Intel i5 “Haswell” processor with much better battery life.  And much more available memory. And a much bigger drive.  So I pre-ordered the Surface Pro 2 with 8g of ram and the 256g drive.  After using it for several months now, as a tablet, a laptop (and now as my entire desktop replacement!), here’s my bullet item pros and cons random review.

As of yesterday, the Release Candidate of Visual Studio 2013 is now available! (And, MSFT changed its mind, so if you have an MSDN subscription, you can also download Windows 8.1 RTM!)

The feature my team (and others) has been working on, CodeLens, has undergone some major updates and cleanups since the preview. To see the most of it, you can go to MSDN’s page about CodeLens.

Here’s just one little picture including some of the new stuff. for the rest, go to the MSDN link above!

This one is much bigger than the last.  Unfortunately, it isn’t a single office.  it would be pretty awesome if it was.  But my team (and most of the rest of the team that makes Visual Studio) is now in “Team Rooms” in the newly remodeled Building 18.  Team rooms are the new hotness, apparently.  I think that every team in b18 (including managers, etc!) are all in team rooms.

Today at the //build/ conference, Visual Studio 2013 was announced and shown in preview form (and download!). And once again, my group (well, my group plus our larger team) made the front page of visualstudio.com:

In Visual Studio 2013, when doing c# and vb, you’ll get extra “indicators” above your methods that give you kindof a “heads up display” of things about that class/method/property. The first one shows you references to the method, if you’re also using TFS it will show you which people have touched that method and in what changesets. Its tfs history on steroids! If you’re also using the built in unit testing features, that method will also show you an indicator that shows which tests test that method, and how many are pass/fail. If you click on any of the indicators, you’ll get a popup that shows you the details, and each details popup window has more useful info and actions you can do with that reference, or that changeset, or that unit test!

So as an MSDN subscriber, you get up to $150 / month of credits on windows azure. And azure supports wordpress, so… I created a site on azure in like 5 minutes, exported the content from my garage based server, imported into my new azure site, and blammo, it’s back up. Admittedly, it took some time to re-install all my plug-ins and find a new theme (the theme I was using hasn’t been updated in 2 years, apparently?), but other than that it was a pretty painless process. Then I tweaked some DNS things (which required overnight to propogate), and everything appears to be working. So far! I’ve been looking for a way to move all of my hosted stuff off of the server that’s running in my garage, and the combination of this, azure’s VM service, and the MSDN credits might finally be a solution!

In the last “what I work on” post, I talked about the Code Map feature that was new in Visual Studio 2012 Ultimate (Update 1). It has turned out to be a very popular feature (as it should) because it is super useful!

After people have used Code Map for a while, one of their first requests is “how do I get debugger information into this map?” There are ways to do it, where as you step through code, you keep manually doing “show on code map” on the method you’re in, but that gets very tedious.

I’ve had a Surface (RT) since the Surface launch day, and I love it. (Note: I am a Microsoft employee, and recently they did give each employee a Surface for primarily business use, with personal use allowed, primarily for evangelism purposes. The launch day surface is my own personal surface, purchased with my own hard earned money). Since buying the Surface, I haven’t used my laptop! Here are just a few of the things that I love about it.

Yesterday, Visual Studio 2012 Update 1 shipped! So I can officially talk about what I just worked on. Much of it has already been available in preview form and CTP releases and such, but you don’t want to get in trouble! :)

I joined the Visual Studio team back in April, just as work was finishing up on Visual Studio 2012. As part of that release, the VS team was moving to much more agile release schedule for updates, so here we are, about 4 months after going gold with an update with lots of fixes and cool new features!

It should almost be called “Lego Superman,” as he’s probably the best character in the game :). Most of the Justice League makes appearances in the game, but they don’t have much importance in the story, which is a shame. hopefully it’s a setup for a full fledged lego justice league game? (related: why is there no lego:Avengers game?!!?)

Easton and I have played through several Lego games now, and of all of them, this was definitely the hardest. In most of the other games, you have to learn how to move the characters. In the first Lego Batman, you also had to drive some vehicles, but that’s it. Lego Batman 2, you have to learn how to: