I am a big believer in making our product development process very transparent with my customer community. The ongoing two-way dialog and feedback is an absolutely critical part of ensuring that we together build the right product for our customers. Earlier this year, we took a first big step in that direction with the release of Community Technology Previews. Visual Studio was the first product at Microsoft which started doing this. You have already seen SQL Server starting to do Community Technology Previews and over time you will see other products at Microsoft adopt this best practice. But like I mentioned above, this is just a first big step in our journey to be transparent in our software development.
My vision over the long haul is to be able to share every spec that we write, be able to share every build that comes our of my main build lab, be able to share our internal discussions around feature tradeoffs and get your input so that we make the right tradeoffs, etc. - in summary, treat my customer community as a key extension to my development team.
A few days ago, I reviewed a presentation by folks from our Community & Customer Engagement team on something we call ‘Broad Customer Connection’ (BCC). BCC programs are designed to create personalized relationships between Microsoft, IT professionals and developers. Activities are focused on evangelism, marketing, and building positive relationships with influencers and customer communities. Via BCC, we hope to give the outside world a look into the minds of Developer Division employees. BCC has helped us reach out to 5 million unique developers via the MSDN website, train over 50,000 IT Pros in Hands-On Labs, educate nearly 500 IT Pros via the Security Web Cast PER DAY and communicate with 800,000 subscribers via TechNet and the MSDN Flash.
In addition to the above, we are looking into having the following best practices be consistently used across all Developer Division teams:
· Identify and manager a group of users interested in influencing the design of the product
· Encourage employees to to become customer buddies via the ISV Buddy program
· Conduct spec reviews with the influencers
· Provide quality responses to 100% of issues reported on the MSDN Product Feedback Center
· Foster a community where 80% of the questions asked in public forums get answered.
· Participate in public chats at least once a month
I would love to hear your feedback on other steps we can take.
Namaste!
This week at OOPSLA 2004, we announced a framework and set of tools for delivering domain-specific visual designers that plug into Visual Studio Team System. In the press release that accompanied the announcement, I mentioned that customers are asking for a faster, cheaper and more reliable way to build applications tuned to their business in vertical markets like Healthcare and CRM. I also mentioned that the extensibility and customization built into the Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team System coupled with the broader ecosystem’s domain expertise offer a more streamlined vision for application development as represented by Software Factories.
Back in May, we announced the Visual Studio Team System and at that time a number of partners also announced and demonstrated their intent to integrate their products with the Team System. This week at OOPSLA, we took another step for partners and released a CTP of the SDK for building new visual designers on top of the Team System. Using the SDK, customers, partners, and system integrators will all be able to build domain-specific modeling tools that plug into Team System.
With this announcement, we are making the “first down payment” on the Software Factory vision in Visual Studio Team System (VSTS). I’ve often heard Software Factories described as an assembly line approach to development. This is a common misconception given the “factory” metaphor. I think of a Software Factory as a customized software product that configures VSTS with packaged content like Domain Specific Languages, patterns, frameworks and guidance, based on recipes for building specific kinds of applications for vertical markets like healthcare and CRM. Off-the-shelf Software Factories are still a ways off, but the approach is still valid and what the industry is moving towards. In the meantime, we're taking the first steps towards this vision today with VSTS and our SDK for visual designers.
The Developer Division at Microsoft consists some of the smartest people I have known. It has been about 10 months since I joined this division and I am having a blast so far. A lot of the leaders in this division have decades of experience building development tools and development platform technologies.
This week, we launched a page that will give you quick access to some of the thoughts that our senior leaders in Developer Division are sharing with you all through their blogs. For example, we have blogs from Eric Rudder – Senior Vice President of Server and Tools, Sara Williams, the fearless leader of the MSDN team, Jason Zander who runs the CLR team, Rick Laplante who heads our enterprise tools team, Lori Pearce who runs the platform SDK team and several others.
We are all very committed to engaging with you – our customers, because this connection is critical in helping us build a better product. Your feedback via these blogs is extremely useful. It helps us get valuable feedback during our design process, get your comments on the early builds and get your involvement in every step of the product development process.
Take a look at these blogs written by our leaders and let me know what you would like to hear from us in our blogs.
A few weeks ago, I updated my blog by writing about Microsoft’s commitment to VB.Net. This posting generated a healthy discussion between C# & VB developers with both camps championing their favorite features. A nice feature for our VB customers in Visual Studio 2005 (and also Visual C++) is ‘Edit & Continue’ (E&C). For those of you not familiar with E&C, E&C enables you to make changes to your code while an application is being debugged. Imagine that you are debugging a complex application. Suddenly, you see that you’ve made an error in your application. Sighing, you stop the application, make the correction and start the code-compile-debug cycle all over again. This means that you spend a lot of time recompiling the application even if you’ve changed only one line of code. E&C changes this and reduces the time required to fix bugs. In the above scenario, you could just fix the SQL query and continue debugging the application from the same point.
One of the top feedback requests from our customers is support for Edit & Continue (E&C) in C# in Visual Studio 2005. I am excited to announce that the C# team took your feedback to heart and has added support for E&C in Visual Studio 2005.
We have always maintained that you should program in the language you’re most comfortable with. If you like E&C but prefer programming in C#, Visual Studio 2005 will enable you to do just that. This is a great example of the large number of customer driven features in Visual Studio 2005. Adding E&C to Visual C# is currently one of the top requested customer suggestions on the MSDN Product Feedback Center. Visual C# 2005 in Whidbey has been significantly improved by adding innovative language constructs, new compiler features, dramatically enhanced developer productivity, and an improved debugging experience.
We will be putting out the next Community Technology Preview for Visual Studio 2005 next week. This will contain the C# E&C feature. Give it a whirl and let us know how you like this!
Check out this page to see the latest information on Visual Studio 2005 and for a link to the latest Community Technology Preview when we make this available next week.