The JPK Experience

This is what it looks like when you embed a video from MSDN in a blog post:

 

Today marks the first release from my current project.  I silently moved on from blogs to focus on the video experience on the MSDN and TechNet sites.  The results of that work are showing up for the first time today.  We’ve done a couple things on the back-end part of the experience that aren’t really visible to the naked eye that we believe will set us up to scale in the future, and we’ve also done a couple of cool new user oriented features.

1) Ratings!  You’ll now be able to rate the videos in the VB DevCenter on a 5 star rating system.  This feature actually existed awhile back and was removed, since we’re using the same DB you may see videos that already have ratings associated with them.

2) Comments!  You can now comment on video pages.  You have to be signed in on the site to leave a comment, but you’ll now be able to comment on a video much like you would a blog post.  You can also subscribe to the RSS feed for comments on a particular video if you want to follow the discussion.

3) Consistent layout!  Previously there were several variations on layout being used even within the VB DevCenter.  Now all VB videos should have a consistent placement of elements on the page and consistent naming of links.

4) Top Ten Videos!  On the right hand rail of the video pages you’ll see the top ten VB videos listed.  This is a step towards our making video content easier to navigate without having to go back to the rollup pages.

I’m really excited about this release.  Today we’re covering around 100 pages in the VB DevCenter and if all goes well we’ll be looking at how we broaden the scope soon.

 

Video page before:

Video page after:

Awhile back Ken Levy did an interview with me for the CodeCast series at Code Magazine.  It's finally available online here.  In the interview we talk about the MSDN Forums, the DevCenters on the MSDN site, and other community topics like product feedback.  This is my first ever "media" appearance (that's actually gotten posted, I did a video with Beth Massi that I don't think we ever put online) so I'm kind of stoked about it no matter how good or bad it sounds (I don't like the sound of my own voice).  Also, the episode right after the interview with me is an interview with Eric Lippert!  I suppose that gives me some coolness by association?  Maybe?  Please? 

If you're interested, check out the link and let me know what you think!

This is partially a test post so I can play with commenting options, but it's also a serious question, what do people think about the ability to require people to have a login before commenting?  Is it a sign that the author is trying to dodge questions that users may not feel comfortable leaving under their own name, or is it just one of the easiest ways to avoid comment spam?

 Let me know your thoughts (and you'll have to be non-anonymous to do so!)

 

-Jeremy

Wow what a ride the last couple days have been.  As many of you probably noticed we've had some problems with the MSDN blogs being available.  Last night we did some emergency maintenance and although problems continued into today we seem to be holding okay now.

We are well aware of just how important the blogs hosted at MSDN are to people.  Both inside Microsoft for people wanting to get information out, and outside for people who need the valuable resources we host.  Our performance problems have been unfortunate and we are working to improve the situation for the future.

As always, thanks for your continued patience.

-Jeremy Kelley

 

This is a post to test out some blog capabilities...

This past week we migrated around 50 more forums from the old forums platform to our new one.  I'd like to take a moment to welcome all new users to the site, and say that if you have any questions feel free to ask me!

For moderators that are moving over, you may have lost your permissions in the move.  If that's the case you'll need to send me your forums display name and which forums you want to moderate in.  One of the features of the new forums is the ability to assign moderators to particular areas, so let me know where you want to moderate and we'll get you all set up.

-Jeremy

Here at Microsoft we like to talk a lot about "ownership" of things.  I myself can be either "business owner" or "community owner" of the MSDN Forums depending on the time of day and which way the wind is blowing.

Do I really own the forums?  Well not exactly, I don't sit on the platform team, so I don't own the development of the forums.  I don't sit in operations, so I don't own the servers.  I kind of own the community itself, but what does that mean?

Basically "ownership" is a way of assigning accountability.  I am accountable for doing what I can to make sure that the MSDN Forums are healthy, that its users are taken care of, and that the product groups that represent the technologies we have forums for are actively participating in them.  The image I like to think of is me as some sort of virtual "Colossus of Rhodes" with my feet bridging the gap between product groups at Microsoft and the user base out there in the rest of the world.  I need to represent each of those groups to the other one to make sure that we're forming a sort of contract around our responsibilities in our little community and that we're all happy with the results.  Sometimes I do a better job than others.

So that's how I "own" the MSDN Forums as a whole, but what does it mean to have an owner of a single forum?  It may surprise you to find out that we do in fact try to have a single individual responsible for each MSDN forum.  The forum owners may not be outwardly visible to the community they are responsible for, but they have an important role.  A forum owner is on the hook for ensuring that their team is supporting their forum the best it can.  They are also responsible for trying to engage the community and get people excited about their forum.

The thing to remember with all of this, is that the forums are an ecosystem, there are a lot of different involved parties, from us here at Microsoft, to you the users.  And the forums only function when there's balance in the community, overall, I think we do a decent job with balance.  Certainly there are areas we can improve, and I hope you'll tell me if there are ones I may not be seeing.  But in the spirit of community, it's definitely true that you all own the forums as much as I do.

After a long week of deployments, patching, migrating of some 600,000+ posts, and more patching, we've finally begun the move off of our old MSDN Forums platform, and onto the new one.

Last week we moved over the following groups of forums:

• .NET Development
• Visual Studio
• Visual Basic
• Visual C#
• Visual C++

We've enabled re-direction from the old forums, so if you have a link to one of the forums, or to a post in one of those forums, you'll be automatically sent to the new site after the obligatory "you're being redirected" page appears.

There are a lot of new features on the forums that I'll get into over time, but I want to call out one of my favorites right off the bat.

When you're browsing the list of threads in a forum you'll see a little arrow between the thread title and the icon indicating the thread type (see the area marked with the red rectangle).

If you click on that arrow you'll see the the thread previewed without reloading the page, like this:

Right now all you can do from the preview is read the thread and see what post is marked as the answer, but in future updates to the forums you'll see more functionality appear here.

To me, that feature helps eliminate one of the frequent complaints about web forums, that loading the various pages, and navigating through threads, takes up valuable time and can be very slow.  Now, if you're looking for the answer to a question someone else asked, or are just browsing around looking for interesting topics, you can do so without navigating away from your thread list!  Combine that with the filters at the top of the page, and finding posts that you're interested in has never been easier on our site.

Enjoy the new forums, and stay tuned for more discussions about new features and other forums related topics.

I'm starting to shovel some coal into the engine of the Microsoft Forums Client project.  As of this morning you can find my rough draft requirements for the project at the CodePlex site for the project.  I've spent a pretty long time working on the requirements, I know the document itself has some areas that need to be cleaned up and fleshed out, but I believe I've got a pretty solid list of everything a great offline client should have.

What are the next steps?  From here I hope everyone reading will go check out the requirements document and leave your feedback.  Very soon we will be turning those requirements into individual feature items in the project issue tracker for everyone to vote on.  Once we get a good, prioritized, list of features the coding can begin!

Keep in mind that just because a feature shows up in the requirements doesn't mean it's going to make it into release one.  We think it's important to get something with basic functionality, and solid stability, out as fast as we can.  That doesn't mean we' won't try to do as many features as we can, it just means that some things may have to wait for release 2 or release 3.  I also think that given the nature of the project, we'll be able to keep making releases over time, even after the core team is also working on other things.

I'm really excited about this project.  I've spent this week talking to a lot of people at the Microsoft MVP Summit about forms in general and the client app in particular.  I've heard a lot of passionate voices around these things and I'll try and post a good recap of the week once I get through tomorrow.

For anyone who's at the Summit, I'll be at the Communities side session from 2:00 - 5:30 or so on Thursday, May 16, 2008.

Technorati Profile

What I've been up to...

Over the last six months or so I've ended up becoming the community business owner for the MSDN Forums.  What does that mean exactly?  Well it's hard to say.  Basically I stand in between Microsoft and all of our community members on the forums to represent both sides. 

Internally it's my job to make sure that the team responsible for making and supporting the forums has the voice of the MSDN customer.  I also go around to teams at Microsoft and talk to them about how they can improve their forums, whether it's spending more time on them, or changing the way they interact with people on them.

Externally, it's my job to help establish moderator guidelines, and work with the moderators when issues need to be resolved (they can tell you whether I'm any good at that last part).

The new project...

One of the issues that I've heard from a lot of different sources is the need for a tool that would let people read the forums offline, and compose responses when they don't have an Internet connection. 

Several projects like this have been attempted before, each meeting with varied amounts of success.  We're going to add another one to the list.

Why this one will work...

This time around we've got a couple things going for us to enable our success on this project. 

First, the forums team is supportive of the project.  We've talked with them about it, and we're keeping close ties to make sure they know what we're doing and so we can get help if we need it. 

Second, since the team has just released a new platform (check it out here) they're really focused on making it a success.  To the point that providing an API that we can work with has been a high priority.  The API isn't publicly accessible quite yet, but it should be soon.

How can you help...

We've started up a project on CodePlex where we'll be doing all of our work.  So far the scope document is published, so feel free to head over and give us some feedback on it.

The first question we need to answer is whether to build a standalone app or a plugin for something else.  I'd love any suggestions you have.  Especially since this tool is all for you my loyal readers!  If we don't build the right tool then we haven't done our job.

As we go along there will be plenty more opportunities to provide input on the design and requirements, as well as helping us actually build it if you're that way inclined!

I'm really excited about this project, so I hope we can make it rock.  With your help as always.

-Jeremy Kelley

It's not often that multiple of your favorite things come together in one big ball of awesome.  But just recently that's happened for me.  As part of the Heroes Happen Here campaign there's a cool new webcomic.  The comic has a really cool tech theme that should unveil over the coming days and weeks.  There are professional comic writers and artists doing the creative side, with a lot of input from geeks on how things should work, and how to keep it as real as possible.  I've been lucky enough to participate in a small way on this and I'm really excited to see it public so you can enjoy it as well.

I'm going to try and not let this blog go for close to an entire year without posting this time.  I've come back to the blog to kick off what I hope is going to be a really exciting first half of 2008.  The first big thing to announce (or at least talk about since Soma already announced it) is the launch of the MSDN Code Gallery.

MSDN Code Gallery is our new code and sample sharing site.  Your first question is probably "How is this different from CodePlex and why should I care about another sharing site?"  That's a very good question, and one that I hope I have a satisfactory answer for.  CodePlex is a great place for doing collaborative or community development for Open Source projects, using a TFS backend.  What CodePlex doesn't really target is the simple sharing scenario.  You've created a code sample and you want to share it with people quickly and easily.  That's where Code Gallery steps in.  Code Gallery removes the source control system from CodePlex, and makes optional some of the pieces that you might normally use for your project management.  Sure, if you want the issue tracker to let people log bugs on your samples you can have it, but for most simple scenarios you can just post your code, edit your wiki and be on your way.

We worked with the CodePlex team to try and make Code Gallery as easy to use as we could so that it would be a good successor for the GotDotNet user samples.  If you have suggestions for improvement, or need some help getting a resource page up and running you can contact us at codeglry -A-T- microsoft.com.  I hope you find some good resources on Code Gallery, and if you've got your own samples you want to release, post 'em up!

-Jeremy

This is a little experiment to see what happens when we try and date a blog post way back in time...