JRoxe's WebLog

New Challenges

2008-10-28T03:27:00Z

After 5 years in DevDiv marketing, I’ve recently made a change to the Windows Mobile group where I’ll be leading a team looking at product management and product planning for the developer space. It’s bittersweet – DevDiv has been a great place to work and I’ve made a lot of friends in that group and in the community. However, there’s also a lot of opportunity in the mobile space and I’m very glad that I’m going to get to keep working with developers. Plus, I get to play with a lot of cool phones… ;-)

I haven’t been in role long enough to have anything to announce here yet…although I’m really looking forward to some of the stuff I’m going to get to announce! As we say in Microsoft parlance, I’m drinking from the firehose! Even knowing the developer audience fairly well, there’s still a ton to learn. I’m curious to hear from you: How many of you do mobile app development (for Windows Mobile or another platform)? What makes it compelling? Do you look for consumer apps or enterprise apps? What are the big pain points?

A lot of those questions get answered in focus groups, internal research, online communities, and just reading the daily press since there seems to be a mobile article every day. However, I wanted to ask this community directly.

I’m down at PDC this week in LA. If anybody’s down there and interested in meeting up, please drop me a line!

I'm Hiring: Are you passionate about professional developers?

2006-02-16T06:04:00Z

Are you passionate about helping to address the challenges that face professional developers? Do you have a technical background and innate marketing savvy? Then we need to talk.

I'm building a team that will be responsible for marketing VS Standard, VS Professional, and VSTO. This will also include all of the language marketing. I'm looking to fill a couple of open positions.

The first challenge for which I'm hiring is the strategy and programs to help developers who are working with v6 versions of Visual Basic and Visual C++ to upgrade to Visual Studio 2005. As anybody who reads this blog realizes, there's been a lot of interest in this area over the past year and it continues to be extremely important to Microsoft. See more details in the first job description below(Job Number 152697 on the www.microsoft.com/careers).

The second challenge is for which I'm hiring is the Product Manager for Visual Studio Tools for Office. As anybody who's used VSTO 2005 can tell, Microsoft is investing heavily in this area. Do you have ideas on how to make Microsoft Office part of every developer's toolkit? Then we need to talk. See more details in the second job description below. (Job number 152699 on www.microsoft.com/careers)

Both of these jobs are based in Redmond.

Does any of this sound interesting? Then mail me with the subject "Cool Marketing Job".

Product Manager: Visual Studio

Are you passionate about working with millions of developers worldwide to address business and technical challenges? Do you have a desire to understand how Microsoft’s technology integrates with customers’ businesses? Do you have the technical skills to explain SOA to a developer and the business skills to explain the value proposition to managers? Do you love being on stage and presenting to audiences of all sizes?

Join one of the most exciting teams at Microsoft and work on driving the success of two of the best known developer products in an established, proven organization. As a product manager charged with helping Visual Basic 6.0 and Visual C++ v6.0 developers to upgrade to Visual Studio 2005, you will take complete ownership of one of the most significant technical and business opportunities in the developer world. You’ll have ownership of the upgrade strategy, product and technical marketing, and driving opportunities with both developers and IT Decision Makers.

Responsibilities include but are not limited to:

· Defining and executing programs to encourage more than 1.5 million developers to upgrade to Visual Studio 2005.

· Owning all aspects of product management relating to Visual Basic 6.0 and Visual C++ 6.0.

· Building field-ready training and value proposition materials

· Nourishing an ecosystem of industry partners to build joint programs focused on developer upgrade.

· Creating worldwide marketing and technical collateral.

· Working with the product team to create and disseminate technical content.

· Being a rock star presenter who is able to demo the product on stage with senior executives worldwide

Education and Experience:

3-5 years of Programmer or working in Developer Organization.

Bachelor's degree(B.S/B.A) or MBA preferred.

Product Manager: Visual Studio Tools for Office

Are you passionate about development and building new markets that could impact millions of developers? Are you excited about touching the lives of millions of users around the world? Do you have the desire to help integrate Microsoft technology with customers’ business needs? Do you love being on stage and presenting to audiences of all sizes?

Join one of the most exciting teams at Microsoft and drive the success of a highly-visible technology in an established, proven organization. As a product manager charged driving Office development and application customization using Visual Studio, you will take complete ownership of strategic planning, product and technical marketing, and customer readiness for Visual Studio Tools for Office.

You will work closely with the product development team and be responsible for:

· Driving strategic product planning for building a new developer market

· Working across the Office and Tools groups to ensure that Microsoft delivers on the “better together” message.

· Working closely with customers and partners to define scenario-based requirements for future versions.

· Driving customer and partner requirements into the product plan and maintaining strong advocacy for their needs.

· Representing developer tools products around the world with multiple audiences, both external and internal: press, analysts, customers and partners, including delivering technical presentations at conferences and customer and partner sites.

· Executing market research and analysis, technology assessment, and competitive analysis.

· Creating messaging and positioning for partners and customers.

· Building the go to market strategy and execution.

· Arming the Microsoft field with targeted content, demos, and resources.

Ideal candidates will be former developers or programmers.

Education and Experience:

3-5 years of working in Developer organization

Education:

Bachelor’s Degree (B.S./B.A.)

MBA

Show your pride: Visual Basic 2005 Case Studies

2005-09-26T20:31:00Z

Have you done some really cool development with Visual Basic 2005 that you've already rolled into production?

I'm continuously excited when I talk to many of you about the great work that you're doing with VB 2005 and the great solutions that you've created. We've got a lot of great stories coming, but I'm always looking for more. If you've built a cool solution and would be willing to talk about it, please send me a note at jroxe@microsoft.com and we'll see if it would be a good fit.

Great Partner Content on VBRun

2005-08-12T21:06:00Z

Almost five months ago, we launched VBRun: the Visual Basic 6.0 Resource Center. Since then quite a few of you have visited the site and have sent me feedback about it.

I'm pleased to announce that we've added a new section featuring content from some of our partners that's relevant to Visual Basic developers. We've started by highlighting InnerWorkings which provides training content that's available right in Visual Studio and provides detailed feedback on code that you write. Over the next few months, we're going to highlight targeted content from additional partners including AppDev.

Do you have additional things that you'd like to see on VBRun? Additional partners that you'd like to see highlighted? Please let me know.

.NET Framework 1.1 and 2.0 (beta) Compatibility

2005-05-27T04:11:00Z

There have been a number of press articles recently about application compatibility between the .NET Framework 1.1 and the .NET Framework 2.0 (beta). You can see an article in eWeek and an article in Microsoft Watch.

You can get the full story on our application compatibility plans in a whitepaper that we just put up on MSDN. Those of you who are frequent readers of my blog, (or those of you who scroll down a few entries;-) will see a request that we put out several months ago to get applications for testing compatibility. Altogether, we’ve brought several hundred applications in for testing. The whitepapers are an extension of this effort – we’re trying to tell you everything that our testing has shown us about application compatibility. We’re also asking your help to test your own applications and give us the results. Compatibility testing is never easy, but there’s time left in the Whidbey product cycle and, as Soma pointed out in his blog, this is something that we’re committed to getting right.

What’s the best course for you to take at this point?

Test your applications and let us know the results. The whitepaper contains a link to detailed instructions for testing your application. These are the same steps that we use when we’re testing applications that come on campus for one of our compatibility labs.
Send us an application for testing. As I detailed in my blog a few months ago, we’re still looking for applications for testing. Feel free to send me a mail at jroxe@microsoft.com with information on your application and somebody from here will be in touch.
Realize that a beta is not the finished product. There are already a couple cases where testing in the labs has caught a change that impacted an application and we’ve fixed the product so that it’s no longer an issue.

What else can we do? Let me know.

Meet with the VB Team at TechEd!

2005-05-23T21:32:00Z

Are you going to be down at TechEd in Orlando in a couple of weeks? Are you interested in meeting with the Visual Basic team while you’re down there?

Nine people from the VB team are going to be down at TechEd and we’re very interested in meeting with as many customers as possible while we’re down there. We’re going to be hosting a couple of customer round tables (stay tuned to this location for more details on time and location).

If you have questions about Visual Basic, want to give the team some feedback on Visual Basic 2005 or have ever wondered “why did they do it that way”, please drop me a line at jroxe@microsoft.com and we’ll see about setting up some time to get together. We’d also love to see a demo of the applications that you’re building and get more information on what you consider to be most important.

Hope to see you there!

VBRun: The Visual Basic 6.0 Resource Center

2005-04-06T01:17:00Z

I'm happy to announced that we launched a new subsite for the Visual Basic Developers Center today: VBRun: The Visual Basic 6.0 Resource center.

This site highlights some of our best VB 6.0 content from the MSDN archive, has some new content on making Visual Basic 6.0 and VB .NET work together and has some additional training on VB .NET for those who are interested. We hope that this site provides VB6 developers information that they need for their current development and ideas on how they could address development challenges using VB .NET.

The site will continue to grow and change over time. Certainly we'll be adding new content, but we're also looking for more community interaction and suggestions on how things should grow. Do you have ideas? Let me know.

An Open Letter to the Community

2005-03-18T03:20:00Z

Author's Note: Earlier today, I sent the attached note to each of the MVPs who signed the petition around VB6. Please let me know what you think.

I noticed that you signed the petition at http://classicvb.org/petition. I'm mailing each of the MVPs who signed the petition directly in hopes of continuing this dialog and giving you some more insight into what’s going on with VB these days.

There was a great deal of discussion around the issues raised in this petition back in 1999 and 2000 when Microsoft initially announced the design of Visual Basic .NET. Some of the input that we received from the MVPs and the community changed this design significantly. One debate was whether the Visual Basic language should evolve to target the .NET Framework. Many of our VB customers felt they had reached the limits of what VB could do and were looking for more – better security, deeper access into the core Windows platform, easier leveraging of skills for building Web applications. After looking hard at the VB runtime, Microsoft made the decision that managed code based on the .NET Framework is the future strategic direction for development tools.

We took a lot of feedback when we made this decision and didn’t make it lightly. The MVPs have continued to give us a tremendous amount of feedback. Much of the way that Visual Basic 2005 looks today is due to feedback that we got from MVPs about features like Edit and Continue, Design-time Expression Evaluation, and the overall simplification of the development environment. The discussions on the MVP mailing list are sometimes heated, but this debate and feedback is what has led to the product that we are shipping later this year.

We remain passionately committed to helping Visual Basic developers leverage their skills and solve new challenges using Visual Basic .NET and Visual Basic 2005. Many MVPs have told us that migration is a difficult task for some types of code. In response to that, we’ve concentrated on first helping developers to upgrade their skills. Later this month, we’re introducing a “VB Upgrade Center” as a part of the developer center on MSDN. We are also hosting a number of free training events worldwide and a pre-conference before TechEd focused on the Visual Basic 6 developer. I welcome your input on how we can work together to continue to speak to Visual Basic developers.

There's also been a great deal of debate around the end of mainstream support. To clarify, this is a switch from free to paid support. Many of the questions around support have been thoroughly addressed in the blogs and the current information is available at http://msdn.microsoft.com/vbasic/support/vb6.aspx. Soma also addressed this in his blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/somasegar and linked to other comments on this. However, I want to highlight to you that Microsoft is still supporting Visual Basic 6 and will continue to for quite some time. In fact, the Visual Basic 6 runtime is slated to ship as a part of Windows Longhorn, which means that it will be covered under Longhorn’s support lifecycle.

There are strong feelings on all sides of the issue that sparked this petition and I know that this note is not going to address all of these concerns. However, I hope that we can continue to have an open dialog around this issue. Some of these discussions will continue in the public forum, but please also feel free to contact me directly.

Best,
Jay

More on VB6 Support

2005-03-12T05:48:00Z

There have been a lot of questions raised about the “end” of support for Visual Basic 6.0 recently that are worthwhile addressing. Let’s just get the biggest question out of the way: Support is not ending. Let me say that again: Support is not ending.

So what happens on April 1st of this year? The change in support that we announced back in 2002 is that we transition from a warranty support model to a paid support model.

The thing that is really affected by this is the 2 warranty incidents that came with the Visual Basic 6.0 box. If you’re an MSDN subscriber, you have the 2 or 4 support incidents that you received along with your subscription. Those will still work during the extended support cycle. If you need to purchase support you can buy a single-instance support question for $245 or a package of 5 incidents for $1225. You can also buy a web-only incident for $99.

Microsoft will continue to provide security fixes free of charge to the VB6 runtime through the extended support lifecycle. The VB6 runtime shipped as a part of Windows XP and so will continue to be supported throughout Windows XP’s support timeframe. The real question being raised is around free warranty support for developing applications with Visual Basic 6. You will continue to have access to all security fixes and self-help online support options (including knowledge base articles, online product information etc.).

The VB6 lifecycle page at http://msdn.microsoft.com/vbasic/support/vb6.asp contains some more information.

Rob Copeland, the Product Unit Manager of the VB team, wrote about this in his first blog post.

Partially-trusted applications?

2005-03-03T22:15:00Z

We're running a survey (only takes about 3 minutes) to get some feedback on partially-trusted applications. How many of you are building them? What do you think?

Here's your chance to let us know: http://host.ultimatesurvey.com/microsoft/surveys/takesurvey.aspx?surveyid=1030

Interesting Commentary

2005-02-25T09:28:00Z

Richard Grimes posted his final column in Dr. Dobbs the other day.

Dan Fernandez replied to part of it in his blog and I also found Scott Swigart's reply on some of the VB comments interesting.

What do you think?

Interview with VBUG in the UK

2005-02-22T01:58:00Z

I recently did a chat with Graham Parker, George Gallagher, Richard Costall and Geoff Hirst with VBUG.NET in the UK. It was a pretty interesting IM conversation and they were nice enough to post the transcript here. We covered everything from the future of Visual Basic to upgrade paths from VB6.

Let me know what you think.

I need .NET Framework 2003 Applications!

2005-02-18T03:04:00Z

I'm working to create a library of applications that we can use for testing compatibility between .NET Framework 2003 applications and Whidbey applications. We don't need source in order to do this, all we need is the binaries for the application, instructions to install it, and permission from you to run it. We're working with some ISVs already to test their applications, but we're interested in finding corporate applications that you're building.

So here's the results if you submit your app and we accept it as one of the applications that we can test:

Microsoft will test your application on the latest Whidbey bits. The degree of this testing will vary from application to application based on compatibility requirements being tested.
Microsoft will report to you the pass/fail result along with the issues in the application that Microsoft observed (in case of failure) and suggestions to mitigate the problem.
Microsoft does not commit to making sure your app works on the latest bits. However, this effort is striving to ensure we are aware of all compatibility issues our customers may experience and are doing our best to ensure existing applications work on the .NET Framework 2.0.
You're responsible for providing the application, any necessary prerequisites (test data, other resources), and setup instructions for how to install and run the application on a clean machine. Microsoft will not be able to test any application that requires domain-specific resources or that has real customer data in it.

Some of the additional information that we'd like to gather includes:

o Company Name

o Application Name

o Application Type (Web, Desktop, COM, and etc)

o Application Development technologies (including language)

o Application Functionality (including importance to business)

o Application Size (LOC, Modules)

If you have an application that you'd be willing to let us test or have questions, please mail me at jroxe@microsoft.com. Please do NOT send the application. If you can please just describe the app, we'll get in touch and figure out the best way to get it.

Gong Xi Fa Cai!

2005-02-17T07:26:00Z

Happy Chinese New Year! (well, a couple of days late).

As a part of my Chinese New Year resolutions, I'm going to write more in this blog, so look for an entry at least weekly.

I spent last week down at VSLive and had a chance to catch up with a bunch of folks even if I wasn't speaking. I actually had a small talk for the theatre prepared, but the plasma screen was busted. One of the things that I was most looking forward to demoing was RegFree COM. This is a technology that Stephanie Saad demonstrated in Soma's keynote at VSLive Orlando but hasn't gotten much discussion yet. If you have COM components that you want to use with your VB 2005 applications (and we know you do), this provides a way to deploy the component to a user's machine along with a manifest. This means that you don't need to register it on the user's machine, so you avoid the problems of "DLL Hell" and can actually have multiple versions running on the same machine. If you select a COM component in a Visual Studio 2005 project, there's a new property "Isolated". If you set this to true, the component can be deployed through ClickOnce and VS will automatically generate the manifest. There's a few caveats including the fact that you have to be running on Windows XP or higher, can't do this to out-of-process server EXEs and can't be used as an add-in or snap-in.

Speaking of conferences, how many of you have registered for TechEd yet? We're going to have a pretty big VB presence from the team and will actually have a PreCon before the event. The Precon's going to be focused on taking your skills from VB6 to VB2005, so all of you VB6 developers who don't know if you'd appreciate the .NET code at TechEd, this is your chance. If you can spend the extra day down in Orlando before the show, you'll definitely have a head start. Also, if you register for the show by April 15th and you can save 15% <-- not a bad deal if you're trying to sell it to your manager.

Hope all's well,

Job Opening: VB Content Strategist

2004-10-19T03:09:00Z

It's been a while since I've written in my blog, primarily because I finally went on vacation and then went straight from Jackson Hole to the Visual Basic User Group Tour in Asia. Matt Gertz and I visited Hong Kong, Singapore and Kuala Lumpur in 6 days. Yes, that's right 4 hotels in 6 days and 15 presentations in 5 days. It was, however, pretty energizing because we had a chance to meet with a number of different users and just missed getting hit by the typhoon that rolled through Japan.

I'll write more about that later, but I wanted to quickly blog about a job opening associated with VB. Duncan Mackenzie, whom many of you know as the MSDN face of Visual Basic, has decided to move positions within Microsoft. We're going to miss Duncan, who has done a fantastic job as the content strategist for the developer center, but congratulate him on the move and on the new addition. However, that does mean that we need a new content strategist for Visual Basic. Matt Powell has posted the job description here and answered a few questions, but to copy the description:

MSDN is looking for a Content Strategist for the Visual Basic Developer Center - a site on MSDN Online dedicated to all things related to Visual Basic. The subject matter expert acts as the public face of MSDN for the subject area to both external and internal customers, and leads the content planning and development for the developer center. As content strategist, planner, and writer, the SME must partner deeply with the product teams to understand the technology and the overall developer strategy.

Major responsibilities include:

· Coordinating with the product and marketing teams to produce a content plan on an ongoing basis

· Commission, review, and acquire content

· Manage ongoing review of content and the appropriate archiving of old content

· Working with site management on publication schedules, headlines, hot topics, featured books, and other content features

· Participating in the community by being actively engaged in the newsgroups and listsrvs; attending appropriate conferences and tradeshows as the MSDN representative; and responding, or coordinating responses, to technical questions directly from customers (ex: via feedback from the Web site)

· Act as a major stakeholder with regard to future site features, improvements, and evolution.

Required skills include a deep technical knowledge of historical, current, and future software security issues, the Visual Basic (.NET) programming language and other .NET languages, the Visual Studio environment; a clear understanding of Microsoft's direction and strategy; ability to work in a rapidly changing environment; solid coding and writing skills; ability to assess content for quality and customer value; proven ability to work across organizations to align goals and execute against them; and an intense passion for and knowledge of the Microsoft developer.

Details for applying are on Matt's site.