Something I'd love to see Microsoft do more of is small, simple, solutions to annoying problems that would delight customers. Here is a perfect example. Google Gode Prettifier A simple Javascript and CSS file, the Google Code Prettifier makes syntax highlighting in a web document super easy. It's pretty...

Source: Sara Ford's WebLog : Influencing the Microsoft culture one open source presentation at a time The thing I love most about my job is being creative in how I’m trying to get an idea or message across, especially when it comes down to challenging the Microsoft culture. So, it’s probably a safe bet...

So you started your application and now realize you've hardcoded strings and you need to start offering localized version. There are two freely available tools you can use to help with this transition. Step One: Remove hardcoded strings and put them in resource files. Our team released the 1.0 version...

John's blog postings on testing open source projects where recently picked up by Mary Jo . Not bad PR for the work our team has been doing and good lessons to read if your team is looking at taking components open. Our team has learned many lessons about the open source world since we released our first...

So Visual Studio 2005 shipped last year. We shipped a service pack in 2006, but in addition to working onthe service pack and the next version of Visual Studio team's in Developer Division have also shipped a lot of cool stuff "out of box". Here is a quick list I put together... Update #2: Forgot...

Last week our team released the 1.0 beta of a new refactoring menu option for Visual Studio 2005. Bertan, the developer, has the details on his blog . The Resource Refactoring Tool provides developers an easy way to extract hard coded strings from the code to resource files. We have finished working...

If you've downloaded something like the "Google Pack" in the past and wanted something like that for your companies products. Something that, with a small footprint, lets users pick and choose a suite of components to install, downloads the requested components on request, and installs them all in one...

In the middle of August Bertan took a 4 week vacation to get married. Well, as is a grand Microsoft tradition, we had to do something to his office. It took us two weeks to come up with the idea. In the end we went on a hunch and decide to build an igloo. This is the story of Bertan’s igloo … ...

Sara recently attended OSCON and wanted to give our team a recap of what she learned there. We figured it would be good education for softies and non-softies if we filmed it and published the video to the Internet. Check out her presentation on Port 25 !

During our team's sprints we've started striving for "Demo Fridays" where our Friday scrum meeting is extended for team members to show off new functionality/prototypes they've implemented during the week. Recently they started this for the division to show off new stuff all across the Orcas wave. I...

Our team is going to release a 1.1 update of the VSCmdShell tool window for Visual Studio and we are spending the day looking for bugs. Because the project is public you can participate as well. Head on over to the codeplex site http://www.codeplex.com/WorkItem/List.aspx?ProjectName=VSCmdShell sign in...

Today the Developer Solutions team has begun its 6 th five week sprint. Sprint 5 saw the release of the VSCmdShell tool & an Alpha of our Best Practices Analyzer for ASP.Net 2.0 . There was buy-off to begin working with CSS on a detailed plan for a CSS involvement in released product communities...

I don't want any part of them. They result in over-engineering, wasted documentation, never-ending discussion as everyone takes the opportunity to put their chef hat on, employees that get stuck going down a path while the world changes around them, and promises to customers you won't be able to keep...

Bertan recently blogged about his next project. Feel free to leave him feedback. I saw the demo and it's a slick feature. Unfortunately not much dev work is going to get done in the meantime... he's out for four weeks on vacation to get married and enjoy a honeymoon... and when he gets back his office...

This is a question that just about every PM at Microsoft has to answer frequently. "What's your big picture?" or "How does this fit into the big picture?" Our culture is one of visualization and we love our grand views. (Hidden pun most certainly intended... sometimes we love our big pictures a bit too...

So, technically, he joined a while ago, but he didn't have an active work related blog I could point to until Monday of this past week. Jeremy is going to do some PMing and some development work on IDE and developer platform related Power Toys that we'll be releasing on Codeplex. His first project is...

http://port25.technet.com/archive/2006/06/29/2666.aspx Sara was recently interviewed on the http://port25.technet.com/ site. There’s soo much good stuff in this interview. They go beyond a basic discussion about the specific tools we’ve released. Sara drills in on our future vision, how...

I saw this today on Slashdot. I’ll admit that there always seems to be some contention here at Microsoft. Even on our team, where we do release source code and allow others to participate in the development on www.codeplex.com , seems to go back and forth. Are our projects, the Developer Power Toys...

I’ve recently been tasked with collecting what you might refer to as organizational goals for our little Developer Solutions team. I think of them as… if we did these 5-10 big things over the next year our team could be considered successful. This is my first take at defining these. I started with our...

Sara has a great entry where she looks at how we are doing so far when it comes to making approachable source code. Sara Ford's WebLog : Power Toys as Shared Source, Collaborative Development Software – Where we’re at and where we want to be . So, after countless meetings with the...

Lots of questions sent my way of late. :-) This set of questions is from another team that’s been looking at leveraging scrum methodologies. I can’t honestly say I’m the best person to be answering these questions. We only have 3 completed sprints under our belt, we’re a very well contained team without...

Here is my reply to a mail that I can post publicly. The mail was from a team in another organization that had some questions about how our team is working. I saw the recent announcement about the v1.0 Power Toys and that generated some questions from my team that you could probably answer. I like...

You can now get the source code to your cell phone . Someday you might probably be able to get the source code for Java . And most importantly to me… Microsoft has launched a site for community development! From Jim Newkirk’s blog : Over 13 months ago (April 4, 2005 in fact) I posted something...

Kevin Downs paid my blog a visit yesterday to let everyone know that a new version of NDoc is in the works. Apparently he has also been receiving help from MS employees who deserve kudos for giving him some much needed information. This makes me think that maybe the best thing we could do for non...

I was forwarded an interesting suggestion today from the Product Feedback Center. Here it is: Put some developers on the open source nDoc project We have used the XML documentation system with our C# code. Full integration with VS 2005 and .NET 2.0 is missing. Unfortunately, the developer for the...