Wow, what a busy afternoon! Funny how things never go quite as planned.

I met with my boss, Craig Symonds for an hour just to do a 1:1. We do these every 2 weeks and it gives us a chance to sync up on things. Craig (who doesn’t have a blog L) is the General Manager for Visual Studio (all the groups that make up VS report to him). We talked about several things:

1. Building an internal “community council” so we get even more participation in our community from inside Microsoft. The council would pull together people from many different groups (product team, marketing, evangelism, etc.) to focus on our community. That way, we can leverage resources better, stay in sync on activities, etc. There are several teams that have done this and had good success. I like it.
2. We talked a little about application frameworks and areas in which we should invest moving forward (post-Whidbey). This was an interesting discussion. I have a lot of interest in the framework space. Having Windows Forms in my team has given me a great opportunity to spend more time thinking more broadly about frameworks in general over the past couple of years. We discussed the need to create more application-level services and components and think about leveraging our existing frameworks in more scenarios. For example, making it really easy to leverage some of ASP.NET’s cool personalization services in Windows Forms applications would be only a small way to do this. I’m sure you’ll see more of this discussion going forward.
3. We also talked about ways we can better evangelize VB. There are so many great things coming out of Developer Division that sometimes we over-generalize our messages. We sometimes don’t do enough to let you all know about how much we are investing in VB, the great things we’re planning for the future, etc. I’m looking at ways to make this better.

Next, I spent 3 hours (of a 2 hour meeting J) going over our VB review for Soma tomorrow. Boy, we never seem to have enough time to prep for these things. But, we want to make sure we’re buttoned up, have answers to any questions that might come up, and are doing a good job talking about progress and issues. We spent most of our time discussing how we can do a better job at making sure samples and other content from Microsoft are available for VB (I’ve heard from many of you that you see a lot of C# samples but not enough VB). We also talked about how to do a better job at providing guidance to those customers that have not yet moved to .NET but want to (what language should they use, how should they approach the move, how does inteorp work, etc.). It was a good discussion and we came up with a bunch of stuff to follow up on.

As I was getting ready to read some email and think about going home, I ran in to Paul Kuklinski and Jay Schmelzer. Paul is the development manager for VB and Jay is a Lead Program Manager. They wanted my input on a couple of issues. It turns out that when you create event handlers in VB’s application framework (things to handle OnStartup, OnNetworkAvailabilityChange, etc.) we generate a file to hold your code but we then hide that file from you. The only way to get back there is to bring up the project designer (by double clicking on the “My Project” item in your project) and then clicking on the “View Code” button. We’ve heard from customers that always having to back to this place to get to the code was a pain. We will probably change this before we ship so that the file that holds the code just appears in your project, making it a lot easier to get to.

Well, I did not get to my afternoon email reading time slot. I guess that means email after dinner. Have a good evening.

-Rob