ALex Hopmann     

March 2005 Archive             

March 27, 2005

Pure Networks- Network Magic

Network Magic 1.0 is released and online today! The technical launch date is tomorrow but Steve and the ops team are hard at work getting the site fully online and polished today since the assumption is that Easter Sunday is a relatively low traffic day if we have any problems.

This is a really scary phase in a startup. Sure we have been getting all kinds of great reactions from the beta, but will people actually fork over $49.95 for it? Now that the "its just a beta" excuse is gone, will we have some killer bug that causes problems for real paying customers? Will the assumptions we made about the marketplace hold up?

The worst part is that its I can't expect to even be able to answer these questions a month from now. Or rather, if we have a million people buy it in the next month, that's a pretty good answer, but I'm not even calibrated on what I should consider a success over the next two months. And if the number of sales aren't amazing, is it because of some issue in the product? Or just the early phase of the company and our publicity. It takes a lot of time to build word of mouth and communicate our story so its not exactely going to be similar to a Windows launch.

March 26, 2005

Software- Ajax

Several new AJAX (Async JAvascript + XML) links today-

Mary-Jo Foley talks about AJAX. Again, this feels like the usual simplification that "there can be only one way". Actually that same line of reasoning is often a bit of a plague inside Microsoft. If you look at some of the real inside analysis from Google people (check Joe Beda's recent write-up), one of the really slick things the Google folks are willing to do is not assume that one approach fits all applications. As for AJAX, its great for some kind of applications and I'm really proud to have been part of developing some of its infrastructure. At the same time it isn't going to make real smart-client apps go away. The DHTML programming model is just too wacky- At Pure we have even used some of it inside the guts of Network Magic but are slowly pulling it out since its just too messy of a programming model.

A new site all about AJAX.

Brent Ashley writes about the architecture behind AJAX. Some posters have complained that this stuff has been around for 5 years (actually its more like 7). So what? It is cool that it is catching on and that people are formalizing the techniques a bit more. Again its also a classic example of the importance of time and just being able to wait for the deployments to catch up so you can really use something.

This all leads to another thought. People get really confused about what the "web" is anyway. Is it a web browser? Is it HTML? Is it HTTP? Is it URLs?

To me there are really only two killer concepts here. There are URLs- this notion that there is a universal way to get to something and that software can be (loosely!) interconnected. And there is deployment- with the web I can count on clicking on something and from 95% of computers out there it just runs and I always have the latest version. I'm spending a lot of time thinking about how we can combine those key benefits of the web with the richness of client-side software & cool user interface.

March 20, 2005

Books- WebDAV: Next-Generation Collaborative Web Authoring

March 20, 2005

Travel- Vancouver

I took a trip to Vancouver for two days last week. Check out these beautiful berries from the Granville public market.

I really wish the Seattle public market was as cool- we seem to only have three kinds of stands- generic produce (ok, so Sosio's is above generic), generic fish, and tourist crap. They have all kinds of stuff that normal local people would shop for- different pastas, herbs, "The Stock Market" which sells soups and all different kinds of stocks.

March 18, 2005

Pure Networks

I've gotten a few questions asking what Pure Networks does. Our main product is Network Magic which is designed to make key home networking tasks simple. If you only have one computer at home attached to the Internet you probably don't need Network Magic, but if you have more than one computer and/or an XBox, a media player (in other words, if you have a router whether wired or wireless) Network Magic will make common home networking things like sharing files, printers and repairing connection problems really easy. Sure, I'm a technical guy and can usually set this stuff up myself if I need to, but who has the time? More info and a beta can be found here and the release of version 1.0 is only weeks away.

Software - XMLHTTP part 5

Update- a letter from me was published in today's Wall Street Journal (subscription required). Welcome to any visitors from the WSJ.

Actually shipping the thing required help from many more people that I've mentioned so far (and I'm sure I've forgotton others). Karim Battish and Sean Lyndersay were both involved at various times keep the spec updated (which was written pretty much after the implementation, but sometimes that is just how it works out) and working with partner teams. Chris Tyner was critical on the test side- I'm pretty sure without his energy and perseverance we would have shipped the thing with numerous holes.

If I recall Chris made this killer HTML page that gave you a UI for sending arbitrary HTTP requests. I think it was called "DAVUI" and it had templates for all the common HTTP 1.1, WebDAV and special Exchange requests, and unlike the tool we had been using before (that was a traditional Win32 EXE) you could just copy this one .htm file to any machine or else run it remotely and it just worked. Brilliant.

There is a new article on CNET talking about AJAX / the Dynamic HTML + JavaScript + XMLHTTP development methodology. It questions whether the AJAX approach diminishes the value of things like Flash and Microsoft's Avalon / XAML. Having spent the past 4 years working on Avalon I think this totally misses the value of Avalon and managed code. Building Outlook Web Access was really really very very hard, and even so the results were not comparable to the real thing (Outlook). You can't take it offline, you can't use it with multiple mail accounts in a coordinated way, and the UI is just somewhat more clunky. This doesn't take away from the core value of OWA in being something you can get to from anywhere. Still, the programming model and maintainability of the DHTML approach was really difficult as the app got bigger. The beauty of many of the Google applications is that they are really tight focused apps that don't try to do that much, but really take nice advantages of the web characteristics. It seems like a false assumption to assume that this approach will scale up for applications like Office. Avalon is based on a programming model that is a big step up in terms of componentization and maintainability, plus it leapfrogs the type of graphics, user interface and just plain experience you can deliver even with finely tuned full Windows code.

The lesson to take out of this thing is to appreciate the importance of shipping and having the patience to let something succeed. It feels like the press (and sometimes even the internal attitude) about something like Avalon is to measure it by how many apps have adopted it on the launch day. That is just crazy and it doesn't get the basics of how big a shift these sorts of things can be and how long it takes to move the mind-set, learning, and deployment of a big new platform. I'm convinced that if Microsoft ships Avalon next year and Microsoft and the industry manage to stick to it and take the long-term perspective, its going to be ubiquitous in 5 years. But it really does take a few years before the actual momentum is there.

That was a great thing about working at Microsoft and I hope they still have it- the long term vision and ability to commit to things until version 3 when it really hits the mainstream. I'm trying to build an aspect of that culture at Pure Networks although it needs to have an entirely different flavor. As a start-up we need to be constantly adapting, shipping very quickly and efficiently. But part of the cool thing about the company and one of the things that really attracted me to it is there is this great opportunity for that really big picture long-term roadmap that is often missing from these types of ventures. Network Magic is a great teaser of the types of things you can pull off with software that deeply understands your home network but it is really just the beginning.

March 17, 2005

Software - XMLHTTP part 4

It was one thing to have this cool component we could use to talk to the server, but we still weren't in any position to use it in the shipping product yet. The basic premise of Outlook Web Access was that you could walk up to any computer that had the browser on it and just get to your email. If we needed to download ActiveX controls, it was going to ruin the basic premise of the product, so the next step was to embark on shipping this thing in Internet Explorer.

Step one was to bring the code up to production quality so we got Shawn Bracewell, one of the devs on the OWA team to take it over. Being a smart guy he promptly threw away all of my code and rewrote it in a more solid fashion, adding async support, error handling and more.

Meanwhile the IE project was just weeks away from beta 2 which was their last beta before the release. This was the good-old-days when critical features were crammed in just days before a release, but this was still cutting it close. I realized that the MSXML library shipped with IE and I had some good contacts over in the XML team who would probably help out- I got in touch with Jean Paoli who was running that team at the time and we pretty quickly struck a deal to ship the thing as part of the MSXML library. Which is the real explanation of where the name XMLHTTP comes from- the thing is mostly about HTTP and doesn't have any specific tie to XML other than that was the easiest excuse for shipping it so I needed to cram XML into the name (plus- XML was the hot technology at the time and it seemed like some good marketing for the component).

While Shawn worked with Chris Lovett on the XML team to integrate with their library, I covered the rest of the "ship it" bases and got sign-off from Joe Peterson who was running IE at the time. We did a quick security review but at the time no one really understood the seriousness or types of vulnerabilities that anything shipping could cause. In terms of quality for the beta the theory was "no one other than OWA is going to try to call it so if it has a bug in the beta, worst case we just can't use it." With a week to go before the beta we checked it in, got a build and tried it out and everything looked great.

The beta shipped and the OWA team was able to start running forward using the beta IE5, while Shawn fixed a number of bugs through the ship day of IE5. It took us another year and a half to ship Exchange 2000, but this was one of those cases where the little bit of planning ahead meant that by the time we shipped the necessary bits were already pretty widely out there.

March 15, 2005

Software - XMLHTTP part 3

I don't recall exactly when we started working on Outlook Web Access in Exchange 2000. I think it was about a year after I joined the team, probably sometime in late 1998. In any case we were already a milestone or two into the Exchange 2000 (or "Platinum") project and had been carefully ignoring the issue of OWA mostly because the old version was such a hack. The old version had been written in a big rush by a pervious iteration of the team using ASP pages and was both fairly ugly and had huge server scalability and performance problems.

At some point Brian Valentine (who was still the GM of Exchange at the time) asked us to figure out what to do with OWA for Exchange 2000. There were two implementations that got started, one based on serving up straight web pages as efficiently as possible with straight HTML, and another one that started playing with the cool user interface you could build with DHTML. When I first got a demo of the DHTML work that Jim Van Eaton and Bob Gering were doing I was just blown away. However they were basically doing hacky form-posts back to the server and had some of the same scalability and dynamic data problems of the old version.

That weekend I startup up Visual Studio and whipped up the first version of what would become XMLHTTP. The first verison didn't have async support hooked up and was pretty crude, but it was enough to help Jim and Bob talk to some of the WebDAV/XML support we had already built for Exchange 2000 and make some really rapid progress with their DHTML OWA implementation.

Next time- how we actually shipped XMLHTTP.

March 14, 2005

Pure Networks

One week on the job and I've already had a ship party. We signed off on the 1.0 bits of Network Magic today (this will be available to the public on March 28th) and rolled out the development plan for our next release to the company.

Certainly a big contrast from Microsoft- the typical project at Microsoft takes at least 3-6 months of planning and executative reviews to get rolling including meeting with at least 4-5 different VPs and Bill Gates. Here we literally pulled the data together in 3 days, rolled it up to the senior management in one, tracked down issues and problems in one more, and announced it to the team. Its still yet to be seen if we are succesful at sticking to the plan and if it all works out well, but the quicker cycle time is really refreshing.

March 8, 2005

Software - XMLHTTP part 2

XMLHTTP actually began its life out of the Exchange 2000 team. I had joined Microsoft in November 1996 and moved to Redmond in the spring of 1997 working initially on some Internet Standards stuff as related to the future of Outlook. I was specifically doing some work on meta-data for web sites including an early proposal called "Web Collections". During this time period Thomas Reardon one day dragged me down the hall to introduce me to this guy named Jean Paoli that had just joined the company. Jean was working on this new thing called XML that some people suspected would be very big some day (for some unclear reason at the time).

After I got the gist of XML, I switched my Web Collections proposal to take advantage of it and published a "W3C Submission" entitled "Web Collections using XML". In retrospect this is actually a fairly embarrassing document, but what can I say- back at the time "push" was the hottest thing on the web and to the best of my knowledge this is the earliest published public document discussing XML anywhere.

This led to me getting involved with some Microsoft folks who were working on the WebDAV standard and I made a big push to move WebDAV to using XML as its model for communicating data. Shortly after I joined the Exchange team which was just ramping up on Exchange 2000 to lead the development of Microsoft's WebDAV servers (which were implemented both on normal IIS over the file system- DAVFS, and over Exchange data- DAVEX).

March 7, 2005

Pure Networks

Today was my first day at Pure. Overall an exciting and a bit of a dizzying experience. I spent most of the morning walking around with Brett and meeting all the various folks around. Its pretty incredible how quickly they have grown lately- a bunch of the people I met had just started in the last few weeks.

There were a few obvious differences from Microsoft right away. You dont have the huge support infrastructure dealing with things like cardkeys and all of that stuff as smoothly- my laptop isn't going to be here for about a week too. And since its not Microsoft you dont always have the latest version of everything- apparently they are still using Exchange 2000, not that I noticed the difference at work (the biggest difference to a non-administrator is in some of the OWA features and in the RPC over HTTP feature for Outlook 2003).

This seems like a perfect time to join the team- they are just wrapping up version 1, and yet there are a ton of big issues to jump into right away for future versions.

All in all very busy- I didnt even really have time to get an answer to which is the best home router to get for myself.

March 2, 2005

Software - XMLHTTP

Leaving Microsoft has certainly encouraged me to reflect a little bit on some of the projects I've been involved with. One that is probably worth sharing is the history of XMLHTTP. This write-up will likely take several days to get out.

XMLHTTP has lately become a huge hit. It seems like people noticed it when Google started using it in the Google Suggest feature and they looked at the source code of that page to figure out how it worked. Google had actually been using it earlier in GMail, but the JavaScript sources behind GMail was much more complicated and people didn't notice it right away.

The reality is that the architecture of GMail appears to follow the rough design of the Exchange 2000 implementation of Outlook Web Access for IE5 and later which shipped way back in 2000.

March 1, 2005

Work

Today's really big news is that I've decided to leave Microsoft to go to a local Seattle start-up called Pure Networks.

I've been at Microsoft for 8 1/4 years since November 1996 so this feels like a huge step. I'm going to really miss a ton of things about Microsoft and especially a ton of people I've worked with over the past 8 years.

At the same time I'm really excited about next Monday when I start at Pure. I've met with a bunch of people over there and it seems like a super-exciting environment with some really great product ideas.

Last Thursday I sent out my "goodbye" mail to internal Microsoft people. There is a long tradition of funny goodbye mails, and plus I felt it wasn't appropriate to talk up what I'm really going to go do, so I made up a story about why I was leaving. I tried to make it as crazy & out-there as possible so people wouldn't miss that it was a joke. I just didn't accommodate for how plausible it was that someone would leave Microsoft to go do something wacky. You name it, its probably been done.

Anyway, here is the email I sent out-

From: Alex Hopmann
Sent: Thursday, February 24, 2005 1:48 PM
Subject: My True Calling (goodbye Microsoft)

I'm sure this will come as a surprise to many people, but I recently had an important experience and I needed to make this announcement. When the XBox first came out I was very excited to get mine, but after the initial glow wore off I didnt really use it for over a year. Until a couple of months ago when I got this great title Karaoke Revolution. I dont know how to explain it really, but the amazing thing is that I was good. Very good. Not only that but a week later I also got Dance Dance Revolution and pretty quickly realized that not only could I sing, but I had some awesome moves too.

I've spent the last few months struggling with this. I really love Avalon and even more so working with so many great people across the company. However Ive come to realize that my real calling required taking my talent on tour. My last day at Microsoft is March 4^th, but make sure to look out for me on the next season of American Idol.

Before I go I just want to say again what a great experience the last 8.25 years at Microsoft have been. Even though Im breaking the streak, Im pretty sure that ResNova Software has been the most successful acquisition Microsoft has ever done in terms of employee retention with 5 of 5 people still at the company after over 8 years. Ive been blessed with working with really great people, and working on some of the coolest technology I could imagine. Most of all I really wish I could have stuck around for the Avalon ship party, but Im looking forward to developing some apps with it myself soon.

Please stay in touch Ill be staying in Seattle (and enjoying a commute that doesnt involve bridges) and you can reach me at alex@hopmann.org .

(my apologies to anyone I left off the initial mailing list- coming to grips with how long the list is of people I have worked with was just amazing.)

The fine print- Not much fine print for this website.