I took a break last week. Along with late night sessions upto 3am playing Halo2 co-op on legendary with my younger brother (we finished about 6-7 levels), I also thought a ton about the C# teams community effort.

Last year, Eric did an amazing job in getting us more involved in the community. Some things we did:

• We got into blogging in a big way. Posts by Cyrus, Jay, Eric were big.
• We had 2-3 SDR's (or software development reviews) where we showed bits early in the product cycle to early adopters and got their feedback.
• We began a more coherent approach to our presence at conferences.
• We spent more time organizing and scheduling chats.   
• We established better content on our dev centers.
• ...

Last year we did a bunch of experimentation around what our activities are. But over the break, I couldnt help but feel that we dont really know how good we are doing. I checked out cluetrain.com and wondered - are we still faceless with our community? How do you guys feel the c# team is doing with respect to making your lives easier, in being transparent with its decisions? Give us a grade, A-F. Let me know why.

Where I'm going with this is to make sure we are doing the right things for you. The C# team is a bounded set of resources and given a large number of ways to make our community better, we need to focus on the big stuff. If you think we are faceless, we can fix that. If you think the stuff we did last year was fun, but we didnt really address more code samples...well let me know. If you think the msdn product feedback center is a good idea but we dont give great responses...I have a willing ear.