Brandon Watson

About two weeks ago I had the good fortune to spend some time at an offsite where I met Gary Flake.  I remember reading the Wired Magazine cover piece on Gary a few years back, but didn’t have any idea who he was when I was introduced to him at the offsite.  As one of Microsoft’s... (more)

Azure Cloud on Ulitzer About one year ago I was fortunate to be working on the launch of Windows Azure, Microsoft’s cloud computing platform.  With the start of our new fiscal year, I was asked to take over a team which was responsible for the technical marketing for our develop... (more)

Here in the developer platform product management team, we have kicked off a new campaign about the .NET Framework.  There are so many people doing so many amazing things with .NET, and we want to hear from you.  The site linked to above has stories from some of our customers do... (more)

In an effort to bolster the economy one job at a time, I have a position on my team that I need to fill.  We’re looking for smart, capable people who know how to get shit done, and have fun doing it.  You must have a passionate desire to make the lives of developers easier, and h... (more)

This week I have been spending time at a corporate offsite.  It’s been a pretty amazing experience, and I have seen/learned a ton of things about which I cannot speak.  That’s a bummer, because I was blown away by some of the stuff I have seen, but it’s internal only for now.  Ho... (more)

I ran into an interesting bug this past wee when trying to install the beta 2 build of Visual Studio 2010.  I tried both the web bootstrap install and the full ISO download.  I also tried the Ultimate version as well as Professional.  Nothing seemed to be working. It turns out t... (more)

using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Text; namespace ScottHanselman { public class HanselmanEffect { public int twitterClicks {get; set;} public HanselmanEffect(int minutesSinceTweet) { twitterClicks = 50; if (minutesSinceTweet >= 10) { ... (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 h... (more)

As part of a mini-campaign I am kicking off at the San Francisco StackOverflow Dev Days, I am upgrading any developer’s laptop to 2×2GB of RAM.  I really wanted to have some 2×4GB kits, but those were a bit out of the price range.  I am here all day – the guy in the bright orange... (more)

Now that I am back as insider at Microsoft, I guess it would be uncool of me to poke fun at the length of the names that we have to squeeze in to our headlines for product releases.  Nothing will ever top my personal favorite “Windows Live One Care Family Safety Settings Beta."  ... (more)

One of my favorite VC bloggers, Josh Kopelman, has an interesting piece on the VC math problem as first envisioned by Fred Wilson.  Having gone through the fund raising process, and hearing this nonsense from VCs, I always gnashed my teeth when a VC was setting valuations based o... (more)

I am going to go on record here and claim that 2010 will see the rapid and inexorable decline of the popularity of the Netbook.  I have been using a Netbook for more than 6 months, and using it with Windows 7.  I finally gave up on my Lenovo S10 with 2GB of RAM. While there have... (more)

The sign lives inside one of the buildings here on the Microsoft campus, and to me it’s awesome for all the wrong reasons. I am sure that there is an argument to be made that this sign does in fact make sense.  The numbers progress, sort of.  Perhaps the person who put this toge... (more)

Really Zune HD?  Really?  I was prepared to write a rocking review, espousing my love for you and what a wonderful little device you are.  I do, however, have some issues with the software on the PC, and our relationship has been made slightly more complicated by the fact that yo... (more)

It was a very happy birthday indeed last week when my wife surprised me with a new Amazon Kindle.  I have more or less been lusting after this product since it was announced.  I even went so far as to do some phone interviews with the Kindle team about a year and a half ago.  I w... (more)

What does a guy have to do to get his StackExhange site set up and running? I put my submission in a while back, but I am probably way down on the list.  So in a creative attempt to convince Joel and Jeff that I am worthy, I figured I would give them something to read.  I spent thi... (more)

I had a great time at the TechCrunch50 show this week.  Looks like I made the right decision to go since reports are that there won’t be another TechCrunch50.  Sure, there’s going to be TechCrunch30 next year! I am still trying to catch up on sleep, and process all of the great ... (more)

One of the things that I have been loving about being back at Microsoft is working in the Developer Platform team.  I have always been a geek, and have this latent developer hiding inside of me.  I love designing interesting applications and services, and love to roll some code w... (more)

This afternoon I was sitting in a meeting discussing a potential upcoming marketing campaign to target developers.  It’s a great concept, and I am looking forward to seeing it come to fruition.  However, during the course of the discussion, it became clear that ad buys would be t... (more)

There’s a funny post over at TechCrunch about an iPhone app that might make you better at your job.  The app is very simple: run the app, push the button at various points of the day, and you might win a prize.  The easy analogy is to the sequence of numbers on Lost. In any even... (more)