Zooming Out
Well, for me it has been an exciting week of introduction to the world of blogging. After creating this one, I spent time looking around at the many out there. There is a wealth of information and personal stories out there (some interesting, and others, well...). I have appreciated all of the comments that people sent to me, and have been amazed to watch the number of views go up each day. I only hope I can keep a reasonable percentage of those first-time viewers coming back for more. I want to say thanks to Brian, our wonderful content provider, for giving me a warm welcome on the Visual C++ Devcenter!
I'm glad that I cleared up the confusion that I was the PM designated to box others (though, come to think of it, sometimes that is my job! - in a metaphorical way, of course...). And while I'm a fan of Don Box, I don't think he has had PMs assigned directly to him, per se. At least not yet! In any case, now that you have a feel for what I do, I think it will help answer your questions if I zoom out from my job to our team view, then the Visual Studio view, and on to the division and Microsoft views.
As I mentioned in my first post, the Visual C++ team is one product team. Brandon Bray, a compiler PM, actually gave a basic team description in his blog introduction. Now, you'll notice that Brandon hasn't posted anything in over a year, so please do note that I strongly encouraged him to find some time to say hello again :) While I'm talking about my peers, there is another recent blogging addition to the Visual C++ community - allow me to introduce one of our libraries PMs - Nikola Dudar. Generally speaking, we are one business unit, with our Product Unit Manager leading the way. Reporting directly to the PUM are the managers for each of the development disciplines - PM (Program Management), Dev (developers) and Q.A. (Quality Assurance/testers). Each feature area that Brandon described has designated PMs, devs and testers with team leads.
The Visual C++ team is part of the Visual Studio line of products, so along with the language teams (C++, VB, C#, J#), there is a central team called Visual Studio Core. Each of these teams has a box PM, too. All of the documentation and localization work are handled in yet another organization. We rely on division level build and setup support, along with large sets of people focused on supporting or servicing our previous releases.
There are many peer teams to Visual Studio in the Developer Division. One is the .NET Framework, another is Smart Devices, and there are many more. As a family of product teams, we work together and schedule together. As this means there is a TON of coordination and management, we are thankful to have a group of individuals known as the Release Team. They have been keeping a blog since last summer, and I think you would find it interesting to see how they try to run this huge set of moving parts.
Our division is a peer to many others. As a division we most often work with the Server and Windows teams, but also partner with others, such as that which Office is a part of. With the many products and services Microsoft has to offer, it is hard for me to say much about each part of the entire company. Most of our major initiatives and many of our company communications are public information. If you haven't peeked at the Article link for What is coming after 2005?, you can check it out and read what our Vice President says about the importance of transparency. I think we have made a lot of strides, but ultimately it is our partners and customers that will tell us if we are striking the right balance.
One of the comments I received was about the reference to Visual C++ as a product, while customers may see us as a feature of Visual Studio. Point taken, and thanks for reminding us. I think it would be fair to say that this isn't just a business reference, since the Visual C++ product line has been around much longer than Visual Studio. You can purchase Visual C++ Standard 2002 and 2003 (I'd guess that somewhere you could even find version 6.0). Even today you can choose to download a Beta version of Visual C++ Express, a standalone version of the VC++ product.
With that I think I'll close this post. Keep your questions coming, and I'll be posting several requests for your feedback and input on the Visual C++ product and how we can help you solve your development problems!
april
