Does the patterns & practices client team listen to the community? It is easy for someone in our position to fall into the "ivory tower" trap and not listen to customers. Within patterns & practices we work hard at listening to the community when working on releases. I am interested in hearing both the good and bad of the client team listening / not listening to the community. So please share as we work on improving our assets and helping you create line of business applications that deliver business results for your customers.

Mike Puleio worked with the development team to close issues identified by the smart client community. He recently blogged about the number of items recently closed:

• Out of 89 open work items/ issues, we closed 45 yesterday.  A number of these had been fixed in the May 2007 release and never closed, a number were fixed in this release, and some were related to different weekly drops.
• Out of the top 25 items (by community votes), we closed 13.
• Looked at another way, we closed 1/2 of the open issues, and 1/2 of the top issues.

I want you perspective on if this is good or is it bad. I view this as good, but I do not want to be in the "ivory tower" so I want to hear from you? When thinking about the question of is the client team listening to the community, I ask:

• What are we doing well?
• What do we need to improve?
• What should we do more of?
• What should we stop doing?

With this feedback, if you can prioritize it I would appreciate it. Just like on your projects, we have limited resources that we need to figure out where to spend our money to have the most customer impacts. By the way the feedback right now is timely given we are working on creating our fiscal 09 plan.

So let us know your thoughts.