Hi, this is my 2nd blog entry. I will try to find the time to update more regularly.

This time, I want to talk about the community documents the SDK Team has available for download. These come in 2 flavors:

    1)planning docs for longer-term planning

    2)sprint backlog/review book-end documents for each CTP release

In terms of documents of type 1, we have posted both the plan for all 4 VS 2005 focused SDK releases ( v1-v4 ) as well as the v2 plan. We didnt post the v1 plan because it had already shipped. You can expect we will post a similar v3 plan. These long-term planning documents allow the community to see where the SDK team is taking the SDK and allows the community to comment on our direction. They also allow the community to see the contents of a particular release and comment on the appropriateness and priority of the contents of a release. The SDK Team highly encourages the community to eyeball these documents and provide feedback.

In terms of documents of type 2, we have posted the sprint plan and sprint review for each release (CTP, RTM ). The community can view these documents as a book-end for the release that shows what we intended to do as well as what we actually accomplished. From these book-end documents for each release, the community can see how the team lives up to the commitments we make at the start of every sprint.

In terms of how often the documents are downloaded, the following report makes clear that while there is an order of magnitude difference between the interest in the SDK download itself and the community documents; the interest in the community documents is growing over time.

Community Downloads Report

Planning Docs

VS SDK Product Plan ( plan for all 4 Whidbey focused SDKs )

2005-December 188
2006-January     211
2006-February   125
                         524 Total Downloads

Feb 2006 planning.xls ( plan for the entire v2 release )

2005-December   90
2006-January     122
2006-February     72
                         284 Total Downloads
Sprint Docs
Feb Sprint
 
    current sprint, docs not uploaded yet
 
Jan Sprint
Backlog
 
Downloads By Month
0 Total Downloads

Review
 
Downloads By Month
0 Total Downloads
Dec Sprint
 
          holiday, did not provide a download or documents
 
Nov Sprint
Backlog
 
2005-October           85
2005-November      152
2005-December        26
2006-January             8
2006-February           3
                             274 Total Downloads
 
Review
 
Downloads By Month
2005-December       77
2006-January           42
2006-February        14
                            133 Total Downloads
Oct RTM
 
        Backlog
            release activities, did not provide backlog
Review
 
Downloads By Month
2005-November  47
2005-December  19
2006-January        7
2006-February      3
                          76 Total Downloads
Sept Sprint
Backlog
 
Downloads By Month
2005-October   24
2005-November  3
2005-December  1
                        28 Total Downloads
 
Review
 
Downloads By Month
2005-October     17
2005-November   5
2005-December   2
                         24 Total Downloads
Aug Sprint
 
Backlog
 
Downloads By Month
2005-October     5
2005-November 3
2005-December 1
                        9 Total Downloads
 
Review
 
Downloads By Month
2005-October      6
2005-November   3
2005-December   1
                         10 Total Downloads
The trend validates our efforts to get these documents in front of the community, as over time more and more people are downloading them. I am interested in feedback on what other sorts of team documents would be of interest.
 
In future blogs, I will talk to the long-term product plan as well as the contents of v2 and future releases. Stay tuned.
 
Phil