Rob Copeland's Blog

As many of you probably know, when we ship products at Microsoft a couple things usually happen: we celebrate, we sometimes reorg, and sometimes people ask themselves “what’s next for me?” Well, it took me 12 years, but I’ve finally asked myself that...

The keynote today was really geat. Bill Gates and Chris Caposella showed off some great stuff in Windows Vista and in Office 12. One of the really cool things announced was LINQ (language integrated query). This is the thing we've been dying to tell you...

Paul Yuknewicz , a program manager on the VB team, posted some good information about VB's participation at the PDC. You can find it here .

I arrived in LA last night and had a great dinner with Jay Roxe , Alan Griver , and Erik Meijer. We talked a lot about VB futures, dynamic languages, and how Arnold Schwarzenegger rode a horse in an elevator at our hotel in some movie (well, yag kept...

It's been a great (and busy) summer and I took a hiatus from my blog (as you may have noticed). I will attempt to get reconnected with my blog starting today. I'm heading down to the PDC next week and am looking foward to talking with as many of you...

I attended an Orcas planning meeting this morning. Even though I took the day off today I didn't want to miss this meeting. Orcas is the next version of Visual Studio (after Whidbey) and we've been spending time working on the "pillars" of that product...

I am taking tomorrow off. Well, I am still going to one meeting in the morning, but the rest of the day I will be at home while roofing specialists come to tell me how much it's going to cost to replace my leaking roof. I think I'd rather be in back-to...

Sorry for the late post, but this is really the first chance I’ve had to post today. I started today out doing something really fun. I attended the science fair at my son’s school. I was able to attend during the time that he presented this morning...

I have back-to-back meetings all day today. I probably won't have a chance to post until this evening. I'll see if I can squeeze some other time in but it's not looking good.

I mentioned previously that we're doing fiscal year planning. For me, this is always exciting because it's all about what *could* be. We get to think big thoughts, go out on a limb, and then put together real plans. It's a lot of fun. It's always a...

I just came from the VSLT meeting (Visual Studio Leadership Team). This is essentially Craig Symond's staff meeting where all of his direct reports get together weekly to discuss the state of the Visual Studio world. We had a couple of good topics today...

I've checked email three times this morning (even after my 8:30 email reading time ). Boy, this whole idea about reading email at certain times is going to be hard for me to stick to. I can see the benefit. Yesterday was a good example. I did several...

I did well on my first "email" period of the day. I got through it all which feels good. I attended a weekly "G7" meeting this morning. This meeting is made up of Soma , Craig Symonds (GM for VS), David Treadwell (VP of .NET developer platform) and...

Our review meeting with Soma went well. We covered a lot of things that we accomplished this last fiscal year and some things we didn't do so well at. Things that went well (that Soma agreed with :)) are: Launching VBRun (way to go Jay Roxe!). ...

Wow, it took me a lot longer to get through my inbox than I anticpated. But, I'm back down to zero . Yes, zero . I have to say, one of the best things about GTD is that the metholdology works for processing tons of information (at least for me). Shawn...

I'm just getting ready to plow through my email from yesterday afternoon and last night. I didn't get my 3 email reading sessions in yesterday as I had hoped. And, for some reason, after dinner last night, I just didn't feel like reading it all (I read...

I seemto be having issues with comments. I just tweaked some settings. I'll see if that fixes them. . -Rob

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...

Even though I practice GTD to manage my actions, I still commit one of the cardinal sins over an over again. I check my email about 100 times a day and let it "suck me in." This week I'm trying something new. I am only reading email 3 times during the...

I mentioned earlier that I'm a huge GTD fan. My favorite blog to read related to productivity and improving one's methods and approaches is Jason Womack's excellent blog . He has a way of pointing out just the right thing to keep me focused and enthused...

I finished getting through my email and then planning my week. The big items this week that I will spend time on are: Working with the team on programs we’ll do over the next year to continue to help folks get to .NET, deliver great content for...

This week I’ve decided to do something different (at least different for me). I’ve had lots of friends, associates, family members, and customers ask me what it’s like to work at Microsoft. I also get asked about what keeps us busy, how we get things...

I don't think we (Microsoft) talk enough about how great smart client applications are. We talk a lot about web applications (and with good reason, we have an awesome web platform and a great set of tools , especially with Whidbey ). But, we also have...

The Toronto VB User Group recently won a user group coding competition sponsored by MSDN Canada. They wrote their application in VB.NET (a great choice in my opinion :)). The application monitors nightly builds and alerts developers to issues and errors...

I said that I might find something interesting to blog about during my trip to Florida. Well, I didn’t find anything interesting here (other than the dolphin that tried to attack my son – but I’ll save that for a different time), so I thought I'd tell...