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Scott Hanselman's Computer Zen

Scott Hanselman's Thoughts on Programming, Technology, Fatherhood, and Life

Do you have to know English to be a Programmer?November 20

An interesting comment thread broke out in a recent post on Using Crowdsourcing for Expanding Localization of Products. Someone linked to a post and used the phrase:

"If you don't know English, you're not a programmer."

The post linked to didn't make the statement so boldly, but it's an interesting "link bait" phrase, isn't it? It's defintely phrased to get your attention and evoke opinions. I don't agree with it, but I wanted to dig more into the concept.

This whole conversation caught the eye of Fabrice Fonck, General Manager (GM) of Developer Content & Internationalization for DevDiv. He wrote this email to me and I wanted to share it with you. He's was a programmer before he became a manager, and English is not his first language, so I thought it fitting. I also added emphasis in spots. Fabrice believes very strongly in the usefulness of translation and translated content and has an entire organization dedicated to it, so you can understand why he'd feel strongly about this.

I began studying computer science and programming in 1985 as a freshman in a business school

Xbox 360 NXE - Forget Games, The Xbox is a Media CenterNovember 20

What's all this talk about gaming on the Xbox 360? I can't remember the last time I actually played a game on the thing, but I can say that both The Wife and I use it daily. I'd even say she uses the Xbox 360 more than I do.

She plays music from the Zune and iPod, she runs photo slideshows for the boys and when we have company.

Recently we had a party for my Dad and the Xbox was showing slideshows of him over the years with his favorite music running in the background. My wife and I didn't think anything of it (it seems pretty obvious to us) but oddly enough it was the hit of the party. A half-dozen people were literally freaking out. The Xbox can do that?

Why You Should Buy an Xbox 360 Even If You Don't Play Games

Here's my list. What's yours?

• You can just plug in any MP3 player or Digital Camera that uses USB connectors and immediately view photos and play music.
  • I've had company come over a number of times with a camera or an SD card, and I've just attached them to the Xbox and we've watched their slides. Just use a USB adapter for camera cards or plug the ca

Update on the GDR that is coming for .NET Framework 3.5 SP1November 14

As I've you've probably heard, we are working on an update for .NET3.5 SP1 and its 2.0/3.0 sub-components which will contain fixes for the small number of bugs reported by customers since the release of 3.5 SP1 this summer. More information regarding the specific bug fixes included in the update will be provided in a knowledge base article that will be released with this update, although at the end of September I blogged about this upcoming "GDR" (General Distribution Release) update to .NET 3.5 SP1 and listed the bugs I've been able to confirm so far as being fixed.

In that post I said:

"Later this year, probably November-ish, the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 will begin show up on Windows Update in a rolling and throttled fashion so that all machines that have .NET 2.0 or higher will be automatically upgraded to 3.5 SP1."

Turns out I was wrong on this, and the update will be available for download from the web in November, and will be up on Windows Update in January. There's a number of reasons for this but the primary one is that customers in general prefer not having any updates during the holidays (IT staff that needs to handle enterprise wide deployments are on vacation, etc) there is no non-security “refresh” for the fourth Tuesday in December, so the next earliest possible release date for our .NET Framework update on WU

Using Crowdsourcing for Expanding Localization of ProductsNovember 13

Not everyone in the world speaks English. Such a silly thing to say, but if you live in an English-speaking country it's easy to forget that many (most?) people in the world would prefer to do their work in the language of their choice.

Microsoft ships documentation in Visual Studio that is human-translated (a huge effort) into 9 major world languages. That's millions and millions of words * 9 languages. How can we cover more languages? How can we make documentation easier for folks who are trying to learn about our products and don't speak English fluently? How can we make English interfaces easier to use for non-English speakers who want to learn English?

Last month, I spoke to members of the internationalization/globalization team in DevDiv (Developer Division) about some of the little-known stuff they are doing. I think deserves more attention as there's some pretty innovative things being done. Some are experimental, but there's hope to expand them if they succeed.

MSDN uses Machine Translation and Crowdsourcing for Documentation

Doing a lot of work with a few people is hard. Doing a lot of work with a lot of people is confusing and expensive. However, doing a little bit of work with a LOT of interested people can be useful, cheap and fun if you "crowd-source" rather than outsource. Check out the screenshot below or visit the Brazilian MSDN site and check out the

Fixed: "Windows Process Activation Service (WAS) is stopping because it encountered an error."November 12

I'm not yet clear what I did, but I'm blogging it so it can be found if someone else has this issue.

For whatever reason, last week both of my Vista 64-bit machines suddenly stopped being able to start IIS (Internet Information Server). The service just wouldn't start. I started getting this error instead "Cannot start service W3SVC on Computer '.'" which wasn't too helpful.

A visit to the System Event Log via the Event Viewer in Computer Management told me these four errors:

"The World Wide Web Publishing Service service depends on the Windows Process Activation Service service which failed to start because of the following error: The system cannot find the file specified."

and

"The Windows Process Activation Service service terminated with the following error:
The system cannot find the file specified."

and

"Windows Process Activation Service (WAS) is stopping because it encountered an error. The data field contains the error number."

and

"The directory specified for the temporary ap