scooblog by josh ledgard

Welcome all miss-spellers of the word “Etiquette”.   You must be wondering how your google searches for “Golf Edicate” or “Hotel Tipping Edicate” or in some cases “Strip Club Edicate” yielded so few results.   Well, that’s because you, like...

I've formed a virtual team inside Microsoft whose mission is to shape the future of the Visual Studio PowerToys site. Since this site was created for customers we figured we might as well involve customers in the design of the PowerToys 2.0 site. Consider...

Almost a year ago we launched a static Powertoys page on gotdotnet. Today that page is no longer static! We're now feeding http://www.gotdotnet.com/team/ide with live content from the new Powertoys weblog . Overtime this site will become a categorized...

Today I took a stab at creating a prioritized feature list for the 2.0 version of the site. If I missed something or you think I have the ranking wrong let me know. Note: It is not a goal of ours to provide a tool upload mechanism. Tool downloads...

The Developer PowerToys site is a "work in progress" directory of cool utilities and tools developed by Microsoft and the community that are meant to improve developer productivity. Currently, on this site, you will find the original list of Powertoys...

It’s sad. It’s depressing really, that some prophecies have the ability to be self fulfilling if people don’t maintain a balanced perspective. I’ve been forwarded several negative articles on corporate blogging. Most are filled with 50% of the story populated...

UPDATE : Welcome Slashdot visitors. I'm not sure how to submit a correction to slashdot, but I am NOT the person responsible for the WIX/WTL projects. I site them as examples and am working with people who where responsible for those projects to enable...

Yes, I was one of the testers for the Start Page in Visual Studio 2002 and 2003. There are a LOT of good reasons we are scrapping it and starting over with a new Start Page for VS 2005. Our redesign certainly takes into account the comments left here...

I don't run my own server and I don't have behind the scenes access at blogs.msdn.com so its a little more challenging to spice up my blog when I get bored of the way it looks. This post describes what I ended up doing and how I did it. I'll also toss...

Update : Check out the new forums welcome post . Word is starting to get around about the MSDN Forums Beta . I guess I should jump in as well. I helped drive the project from the Developer Division side of things, but we wouldn't have anything to talk...

Friday marked my 5th anniversary at Microsoft! In those 5 years I've had the opportunity to have three distinct careers. I spent 1.5 years as an individual Developer in Test, 2 years as a Dev in Test Lead, and the last 1.5 years as a Program Manager....

One good piece of feedback I've heard about on-line communities recently is that in today's world of easy on-line publishing. A world where everyone is now getting comfortable with on-line interaction is a world where the number of people who "shoot first...

Update #4: You may now download your hotfixes without contacting support! ... this was the biggest issue that most customers seemed to have. Fixes for the other issues will also be coming online shortly. Thanks for all your feedback. Update: To be...

I've been working on a spec that defines potential improvements to the http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN RSS experience. Here is a draft of that specification for feedback. I've also created a sample feed (static) based on the specification for you to...

Looking for some good input examples to kick start your test planning? Read on!...

One of the other jobs I have at Microsoft is to be the Community Lead for the VSCore team.  I won't get into what that means just yet (I think we are still trying to figure that out.). One of the benefits recently is that I was asked to take a...

Last week I took the time to write up my thoughts on Corporate Transparency while no one was looking. There is no part 5, but I needed a post where I linked to all four entries and provided an abstract for my own reference that I could point people to...

Hello Scooblog readers! If you read my blog and have a blog then please leave a link below. I’d like to read your blog too. I’m looking to shake up my subscribed feeds list and the first thing I want to accomplish is make sure that I’m listening to my...

IMO the MSDN Forums have been doing really well so far. The early success and feedback has been encouraging to the point that I believe the forums will ultimately be a welcome edition to official MS community offerings. I've been pretty stressed about...

Ok, I know I just raved about my new phone like every other MS employee. No, they are not just dropping them off at everyones door. Yes, they do give us a pretty good discount on them. I spent a lot of time over the last few days trying to learn everything...

If you had a choice between optimizing the forum post form around cut and paste from Visual Studio and Word or around the "format code" buttons that exist today which would you choose and why? Option 1: Support cut and paste from the Visual Studio...

My wife and I seem to have had some friendly competition as developer community engagement has made our jobs have been very similar over the last few months. I had a decent blog, she took her writing skills and created a better blog . I started the Powertoys...

Its slow around here this time of year and the subject of this post became the topic of a lunch conversation on our team. It's been suggested that Internet search engines can provide an answer to almost any inane question one could come up with. We...

And this is likely to be the last post I make to this blog. By the time you read this I will have likely handed in my card key and celebrated with the great people I’ve worked with over the last 7 years. One of the key values that Microsoft instills...

Background : The VBCommenter is an addin for VS 2003 that gives you the ability to automatically generate XML comment headers in the VB .NET editor similar to what the C# editor automatically generates. It will also generate the XML comment file to go...