One of my responsibilities is overseeing the C# team's involvement in community, where community is anything we do that has direct customer touch. Everything from working with MVPs to design reviews on new features to the C# Dev Center. Duncan , Dan , and I collaborate on the whole community effort....

Shaykat talks about ZBB

This morning I presented at a community review for my manager, my second level, my third level, and my fourth level (one of the MS VPs). The review is about how our division is doing on community overall, and I owned talking about some of the things that we've been doing on the C# side (blogging, FAQ...

Anonymous Corporate Coder wrote a comment on my ZBB post, asking what set of bugs ZBB relates to. I started to update that post, but it quickly expanded, so I've decided to write a separate post. We're organized around a milestone approach. Some milestones are date-driven, some are quality-driven...

ZBB = Zero Bug Bounce As we start moving from the writing code phase into the fixing bugs phase, the development teams start pushing towards zero bug bounce. If you've noticed that the number of blog posts from the C# team has down a bit recently, that's one explanation. Why is it called zero bug...

Every year, Microsoft does a widespread poll to determine how people view their work environment, their compensation, etc. One of the questions is something like, “Are you satisfied with your work-life balance?” That tends to be a sore topic on the PM side. Perhaps a bit of an explanation...

This afternoon after lunch I ambled over to our admin's office in search of a small snack. I opted for some m&m's brand chocolate candies with peanuts. As I ate the 7 m&m's that were in the package, I noticed that the package was labelled "Fun Size". Others may disagree, but personally...

I got an email from a customer today, in which he noted that the C# compiler allows you to write: bool b = ... switch (b) {     case true:         ...         break;     case false...

On Tuesday, I asked a question about whether people keep their form class names and form filenames in sync. I'd like to thank all who responded, and provide a little background on the issue. To do that, I'll have to explain a bit about our internal development a process. Many of you have probably...

With PDC coming up, there have been lots of Microsoft entries about what makes a good presentation, and I'd like to throw my 35 cents into the discussion. Here are three things I like to keep in mind. Why is always more important than what Technical people are smart and used to figuring...

Today I set a new record in the amount of time I spent on a single email. I've been trying to coordinate a change in how generics work. Ultimately, this will involve coordinating with about 10 teams to figure out how to make a breaking change without breaking the build (which is a pretty big in...

I got a ton of comments on my post on the new project templates, and rather than try to answer them in the comments, I thought I 'd answer them here, so they're at least somewhat coherent to read. Oh, and thanks for all the comments. One more note: Some of the things that I did in the console...

One of the things I own for the C# team is the project system. For this, I'm what's known as a relationship PM , which means that I'm responsible for something but there's no C# team that does project system work. My job is to figure out what the C# user needs and drive them to the VS Core project...

So, I'm working on a music playing application (to be revealed sometime around PDC, or perhaps a bit later if I don't get it working) to play around with Whidbey features. One of the things I want to do is be able to display the album art. So, I dust off the docs for WMP - which are a bit spotty...

Today, Scoble gave me a field promotion . After I publicly gave him a hard time for it, I got thinking about what a strange thing it is to be a program manager, and that some people might be interested in what we really do. I'm therefore going to talk about what I do from time to time. ...