For the past two years, I've been working to improve developer community here at Microsoft. We've seen some pretty great times--the forums continue to grow at a huge rate, we released several open sourced power toys, and we've seen a change in culture...

Last week I traveled with my manager down to Mountain View to attend the Online Community Unconference. I went to the conference last year when it was in San Francisco, and I found it to be a great gathering of ideas and people who are truly excited about...

If you're a Zune owner, I hope that you at least tried out the 2 week free trial subscription to the ZunePass service that allows you to download as many tracks as you want from the Zune service in a "rental" fashion--as long as you keep paying your fee...

Tomorrow I will be attending the Online Community Unconference in Mountain View, CA. It's been a little bit over a year since the last time I attended this conference, and I'm looking forward to seeing whether or not people's focus has changed over the...

As part of the larger group of feature improvements in forums that includes the reputation changes that I blogged about earlier , we're also adding in something that people have been asking about for awhile--product feedback and bug reporting. The...

Popfly has been out for about a week now, and I'm excited about it. Why? Is it because I've seen the site evolve internally over the past few months? Is it because it's the first "real" application I've seen that really shows off the power of Silverlight...

Over the past year, I've done quite a bit of blogging on reputation and got quite a bit of feedback back from you as a community. Well...I've got good news and I've got bad news. The good news is that we're actually working on a reputation system. The...

Recently, a forum moderator asked for some clarification from me in the moderators forum, and I'd like to respond to his question publicly. His post was quite eloquent and long, but his question could be summed up with: Why are there tons of Microsoft...

A little bit ago, I started talking about ways that we could measure the success of the community without using pure "answer count" as the only barometer for community health. I decided to do a little bit of data mining today and looked for the people...

Last Edited: 4/10/2007 There has been much discussion on what to do with off-topic posts, especially in the moderators forum. I've gotten a request to make an executive decision and stick with it, for here on forth, here is the official Microsoft guidance...

Last Edited: 4/6/2007 [I'll be amending the lists in this post based on the comments and continual feedback that comes in. Thanks for hanging with me here.] We've recently released a service pack for the forums that have changed some functionality...

For over year, we've been measuring a few key metrics in the MSDN Forums to monitor overall forum health. We track them aggressively, send out biweekly mails about them, and use them as guideposts to make decisions about what we should or should not do...

When at a loss for what you might want to blog about, go to Digg.com...and voila--the top entry on the page was about a new site that's using Web 2.0 online community concepts to bubble up the best technical pieces of content to other devs. http:/...

I've gotten the message so many times it's ridiculous--the MSDN Forums display emoticons in the middle of code snippets. Nothing, I mean nothing, will make a developer more mad than a cutesy little light bulb rendering in the middle of their carefully...

James asked a good question in the comments section of my last blog post, and I thought the topic might be a fun blog post to end a Friday on. What exactly was the one millionth post? Well, the one millionth post on the MSDN Forums was the fifth post...

Today I was doing a little bit of housekeeping on the MSDN Forums and I noticed the post ticker at the bottom of the page... In case the picture comes through fuzzy--today we broke through 1,000,000 posts on the MSDN Forums, almost exactly two years after...

As you probably know if you follow this blog regularly, I'm a big digital music fan that's been trying to move from iTunes to a Microsoft-based platform for over a year. I bought a Zune right after the Zune's release in November, and I've generally been...

Another MVP Summit has come and gone. Maybe it was the fact that I was busy moving the weekend before it started, but wow, it just seemed to fly by! I had the opportunity to meet with some great MVPs that I've been working with in the forums, sit in on...

I'm almost positive that I'm not crazy here...well, I think so at least. During the day here at work, I listen to music if I'm doing something on my computer by myself in my office, I'm usually listening to music. Since I got a Zune , I've been using...

It's that time again...the MVP Global Summit is happening this week in Seattle and Redmond. The first Summit was one of my favorite experiences so far working at Microsoft--I love talking to customers and hearing it "from the horse's mouth." It's not...

Wow. I looked at my blog today and realized that it had been nearly a month since the last time I put anything in my blog—and that post was written by a blog reader. If the key to a successful blog is regularity, my blog is currently the cyber-equivalent...

I've gotten lots and lots of questions about my previous couple of posts about how to move your music library from Apple's iTunes to Windows Media Player over the past couple of months. Jerry Leynes of Jacksonville, Florida has cleaned up and augmented...

If you've been following my blog or the blogs of my teammates ( Josh , Sara , Jeremy , Bertan , or Kannan ), you might be interested in the very latest about Power Toys and tools for Windows development. Don't you just wish you could take more information...

The trickle-down effect through MSDN bloggers has finally made its way to me, and I've been tagged by Josh Ledgard in the 5 things you may not know about me "thread". Here it goes: This one might be obvious, but I'm a complete gadget junkie. Even Microsofties...

When I first started with the DevDiv Customer Connection team, Josh gave me the thirty-second elevator speech about his goals for the forums. The phrase "self-sustaining community" was used more than once. The idea was that just creating the forums or...