Inside the Curly Brackets

by Andrew Himes
Editor-in-chief, Developer Network News

On a singularly dull and dreary morning in late November (apologies to Edgar Allan Poe), I was running through a cold, drenching rain, about halfway through a half-marathon in the company of several thousand wretches as miserable as myself. My socks and shoes were soaked. I had aqueous rivulets running down my face. My calf muscles were screaming. I chanted to myself, over and over, "You should have stayed in bed, you fool, you should have stayed in bed, you fool, you should have stayed in bed, you fool."

All around me, my fellow sufferers were going through their own private agonies. A pop-eyed woman in chartreuse lycra and smeared mascara muttered and moaned as she plodded through the puddles. An elderly gentleman with protruding, white ear-hair breathed deeply and sonorously, his sizable orange shorts billowing with each short hop forward. A skinny, blond boy of 14 or so, his shirttail flying free, skipped past me noiselessly, and I thought I detected in his silence a note of contempt for my advanced years—he probably held his breath to give the impression of effortlessness.

Just as I approached my apogee of athletic despair, two young men deep in conversation trotted past me. "You see Bill Gates on the David Frost show last night talking about the Internet? He was awesome! Pretty deep." "Yeah," said the second one. "The Road Ahead. New book. Very cool. Makes you think."

Panting heavily with exhaustion, I realized anew that I would never be able to escape the Internet. For 18 months, my waking hours at Microsoft have been consumed by the Internet. My dreams have been inhabited by the Internet and its acronymic acolytes—HTML, CGI, FTP, and HTTP. The ads in my daily newspaper have been invaded by URLs on the WWW. And my father, a retired minister in Rome, Georgia, is eager to access e-mail and cruise the Web researching his family tree—just as soon as I can get him set up with a modem when I go to visit at Christmas.

So, if I can’t escape the Internet, I may as well give it a friendly bear hug—as we have done yet again in December on For Developers Only, the developer section of Microsoft’s site on the World Wide Web (http://www.microsoft.com/devonly). We’ve engineered a major redesign of our website, with a snazzy new front page and glorious new graphics. You’ll see more and deeper technical and strategic information about Windows-based development throughout our site.

And be sure to check out a brand new area of content, the Microsoft Internet Developer Toolbox (http://www.microsoft.com/intdev/), an online publication devoted to the technologies, systems, and tools from Microsoft related to building and delivering applications on the—guess what?—Internet.

Meanwhile, I’ll try to stop breathing so hard.