Microsoft Research Projects

Stay up-to-date with the latest output from MS Research.

Try Infer.Net from MS Research.

To see some of the project output you need Silverlight (6MB exe file, currently on v4).

Learning a New Software Product

Learning a new software product is fraught with pain and anguish.

Error messages systematically archived to a notepad file help to alleviate diagnostics but what about screenshots? In fact, WordPad is not bad in this regard.

Relative tradeoffs between WordPad vs Ms WORD make wordpad the preferred tool in many instances.

Another Egregious Parsing Bug in Microsoft Word (and Excel)

Another nasty parsing bug in Word. Wasted 2 hours of my time. Fully replicable. Where is the quality control? Excel also - tries to recognise dates in text when no dates exist. Special characters like left-arrow and dash always confuse Word and Excel. Both applications start to look for patterns that are not present. Madness!! Parsing errors are the most problematic aspect of Microsoft software. Also happens in Visual Basic quite a lot.

XPS in Windows

XPS is the XML Paper Specification. Here is the XPS Team Blog. It's a complementary technology to WPF although it can also be used in unmanaged Win32 applications.

Just Want to Do Simple Diagramming

How to do? Visio is expensive and huge. MS Paint can't draw nice arrows. Will PowerPoint do? Ppoint can make pdfs also and has nice arrows. What about the open-source Dia? This has nice arrows too, if you draw a line it draws an arrow by default, a nice feature. If you right-click the line you get various arrow properties like line-width etc. Cntrl-S will save your file in ".dia" format. If you want to save in bmp for example, you need to hit Alt-FE (File->Export) and select Pixbuf[bmp]. Cntrl-Z is a very useful shortcut for Undo (the usual Windows Alt-Backspace doesn't work) especially if you create a shape that occludes and existing shape. Unlike Paint, you can edit written text using the "Vertical Bar" (Text edit tool).