I was doing some birthday shipping for my wife a few weeks back. I actually
had to hold off on posting this write up because I didn’t want to tip her
off to what sorts of things she might expect for her birthday.
This post isn’t about her birthday, however, but rather Amazon and their
collaborative filtering mechanism which makes recommendations to you while
you are shopping. Given that the search term with which I started was
“gymnastics mats,” I can understand 4 of the 6 of these
recommendations. I can even go out on a limb and convince myself that, yes,
people who are likely to be buying gym mats need to keep deer away. Think
of the liabilities to the gym studios when that first deer hurts themself.
The rules just aren’t set up for four legged participants. Sadly, Bambi
and her friends are really into gymnastics, and they keep hanging around.
It was the bo... (more)
Today at Mix10, Microsoft released the developer tools for Windows Phone 7
Series. I’m excited about seeing what apps will get built now that there
is general availability of the Windows Phone dev tools. That’s general
availability, as in for everyone!
Charlie Kindel (if you aren’t, you really should follow him) was nice
enough to get me access to the tools about 3 weeks ago, despite the fact that
he and his team have had plenty on their plate since going public with WP7.
I have spent some time in the last few winks building and tinkering.
A little background on my dev skills.... (more)
Brandon Watson's "Many Niches" Blog
There’s been quite a bit of chatter on the web about the Azure Services
Platform. Obviously I’m excited to see people talking about our new
platform, especially when there is plenty of good, some bad, and some good if
not somewhat rambling. There will be no shortage of guessing as to what
Microsoft is “really up to” with our development efforts.
I wanted to take a crack at that one, but from a completely different
perspective. I want to frame the discussion centered on the motivations of
the platform providers, and let that be a guide to understa... (more)
About 3 weeks ago, I wrote this article about the Kindle, and mentioned how I
thought that for various reasons attached to the Kindle, I was actually going
to be reading more.
Shortly thereafter, I got a ping on Facebook from someone I didn’t know.
His name is Brad Stone, and he identified himself as a journalist and he had
some questions about my blog post. I rang him up, and we spoke for a
while. In today’s NY Times is the article he was writing.
The point in sharing this is (aside for a shameless plug, and an attempt to
get people to say “awwwwww” about my daughter) to unde... (more)
I have been asked by a few people how sites like WP7AppList get their data.
The Windows Phone Marketplace, which you access on your PC via Zune software,
uses XML to get data over the wire. I wanted to share a couple of code
snippets which might help an erstwhile data junkie on their way. This code
works. It may not be the most elegant solution, but it works, and I wanted
to share it with others in case they wanted to see how to parse the XML, or
how to write LINQ queries against it.
Caveat – this is a geek enthusiast post. I used Fiddler to figure out how
to parse the XML.... (more)
Brandon Watson is Director for Windows Phone 7. He specifically focuses on developers and the developer platform. He rejoined Microsoft in 2008 after nearly a decade on Wall Street and running successful start-ups. He has both an engineering degree and an economics degree from the University of Pennsylvania, as well as an MBA from The Wharton School of Business, and blogs at 
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