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chadr's skewed perspective

Please don't let Word auto-correct my name.
Dear Customer

Dear Customer,

My name is Chad and I work at Microsoft.  I help make Visual Studio.  Who are you?

I want to get to know you better.  I talked with you in email, newsgroups, instant messaging.  If I'm lucky, I met you at a conference;  Over beer & chicken wings (well, more likely, warm soda and cold pasta) I put a face & personality with the name.  But when the conference was over, we both went home and the faces might have been forgotten.

I want to know your face and what you do with my product.  You see, I know you make a living with Visual Studio.  I think you might even have fun with VS.  I want to remind myself and everyone I work with that you're out there, depending on us to build you a great development tool as we work on Visual Studio Whidbey.

You are important to me!  You spend your money and time on VS, and you expect VS to help you make more money and time.  You will be using Whidbey to make your living, paying for braces and college and retirement, buying coffee and beer and cigarettes, contributing to political and social causes, paying income taxes and mortgage interest, ordering pizza and books and flowers.

So tell me who you are and what you do with VS.  Send me a picture.  I'll print your picture, write your name on it, and write down a word or two about what you do with my product.  I'll put your picture up in our hallway and help everyone on my team remember you're out there, depending on us to build a great VS!

I've put up a picture and a little info about me.  I would love the same from you, so send it to me!  If you have published yourself on the web, like in a blog or on the web site for your business, you can send me a link to that info.  But do send it!  And tell your friends.  I'm new to blogging and don't have the readership to reach all my customers.

I'm looking forward to knowing you better!
Chad

Posted: Friday, May 14, 2004 3:40 PM by chadroyal

Comments

Jerry Dennany said:

Hi, Chad. Welcome to blogging.

Since you've invited me to ask, I noticed that part of what you said that you worked with is MSBuild. One of my complaints about Whidbey is that Visual Studio C++ project files will not support MSBUILD. This is actually pretty disappointing, as many software shops that are to integrate .NET into existing C++ applications. MSBuild could make this easier.
# May 14, 2004 4:49 PM

Scott C Reynolds said:

Chad, nice to have you in the Blogosphere.

I use your product to pay my netflix subscription, and less important things like rent and stuff. I'll tell you I've liked every version more and more, and can't wait for 2005. Keep up the good work.
# May 14, 2004 7:21 PM

Michael Carr said:

Since you are involved with the core code editor, is any chance we can get a service pack that fixes the HTML code mangling? This would be especially useful now that VS 2005 has been pushed back to 2005.
# May 14, 2004 9:05 PM

Sean Chase said:

I'm a contract developer (consultant, whatever) and I make *ALL* of my money developing solutions with Visual Studio .NET right now. In fact, I'm all about Microsoft products because that's where I've found the demand and I have always liked the dev tools. Sql Server, IIS, .NET, VC++, VB, Internet Explorer (binary behaviors). I started out programming in PowerBuilder and AutoLisp of all things and once I made the move to VC++ and VB, I've never looked back.

Anyway, that's who I am. :)
# May 15, 2004 10:20 AM

Ryan Farley said:

Hi Chad. I am a VS.NET user.

I am a developer/architect and live in VS.NET. I have VS open 100% of my time. When I am working, I am working in VS. When I am playing I am in VS (hey I am a geek with a passion for programming and no life - so what else am I going to do?). I do mostly service based projects for large companies and have done jobs for several fortune-500 companies. I regularly train developers in VS & .NET and design application frameworks for development teams.

I love VS and .NET and spend a lot of my free time playing in whidbey - can't wait for 2005. See picture on my blog: http://www.ryanfarley.com/
# May 15, 2004 3:16 PM

aaron's weblog said:

# May 15, 2004 8:19 PM

aaron's weblog said:

# May 15, 2004 8:28 PM

SanjayVyas said:

If you are a Visual Studio user and want to get in touch with guys...
# May 16, 2004 8:48 AM

Asbjørn Ulsberg said:

Hi Chad. I make almost all my money working with Visual Studio.NET, and I plan to do so in the future as well. But there are a couple of things I would love to see improved, and that is the data integration of VS.NET.

I tend to build a pretty complex data layer in my applications, with SQL Server 2000 at the bottom, with tables and views which Stored Procedures work upon. These Stored Procedures are dragged into the component designer of VS.NET to make factory classes I work with in the presentation layer of my applications.

Being able to drag-drop is great, but I would love if I got even more stuff «for free». Now, when a procedure is changed, I need to delete the previous one from the component, and drag-drop the changed one into the component, and then set the connection property, 'Source Column' and stuff of the command object.

Instead I would love to have a «update command» option on the command object, which re-synced it with the underlying stored procedure, without destroying all the customization I've done on it. I have a couple of other wishes as well, but we can take them some other time. All in all, I really like Visual Studio. Kepp up the good work!
# May 16, 2004 11:33 AM

nospamplease75@yahoo.com (haacked) said:

My picture is out there. I'm Haacked in Orkut. My blog is http://haack.org/.

I've used Visual Interdev 1.0, 6.0, VS 6.0, VS .NET and VS.NET 2003. The only thing I want is for the designer to stop messin' with my code. I know what I want better than it does. And I don't want to wait till Whidbey.

It's making me look bad. ;)

Phil
# May 16, 2004 1:18 PM

Ryan Farley said:

Haacked, I could not agree more.
# May 16, 2004 10:57 PM

Pandurang said:

Hi Chad, Another of your customers from the VS 6.0 times to the recent Whidbey times. And I think your product is just getting better and better! There are times I worry if we'll all just have to start Visual Studio and sit thinking.. and it'll do everything for us. That is true INTELLI-SENSE :)
# May 17, 2004 6:37 AM

Milan Negovan said:

Hi there, Chad!

A few requests if I may:

1. Fix the CSS source editor, pls (http://aspnetresources.com/blog/VSNETGotchas.aspx)

2. Get rid of the annoying error with get_aspx_ver.aspx (http://aspnetresources.com/blog/WhatIsGetAspxVer.aspx).

3. Please, don't make VS.NET destroy my markup. Please, please, please!

Other than that, you are doing an oustanding job!

Milan Negovan
# May 17, 2004 6:49 AM

Bryant Likes said:

Hello,

I've been a VS user since Visual InterDev 6.0 first came out and I really like how far the product has come. I just hope you keep somewhat light and simple and don't overload it with trying to make everything possible without writing code (like the 6.0 days). Also:

1) Update SourceSafe! There is lots that can be done with this product.

2) Make it even easier to write C# comments while coding. Not the inline comments but the kind of comments that products like nDoc can use to automate documentation.

Thanks!
# May 17, 2004 10:28 AM

Lynn Eriksen said:

Hey Chad, my name is Lynn. I live in Houston, and I am an ASP.net developer. I work in VB, C#.

I do a LOT of reading, and I'm pretty up to speed as it were on what is coming in Whidbey. I'm a bit disapointed about the ObjectSpaces delay, but other than that Whidbey seems to be a very nice upgrade.

The thing that I am most interested in is Whitehorse. I've seen some information about it, but not enough. I know that the big selling point is on wiring services, but what I'm most looking forward to the most is the class designer. Specifically, the abilty to show relationships between classes. This will help dramatically in developing/managing large frameworks. Is there any recent info you can share on this?

Lastly, is there any info you can share on when me might see a Whidbey public beta? I don't have MSDN (yet), so I have to wait for the preview.
# May 17, 2004 11:49 AM

scooblog by josh ledgard said:

# May 17, 2004 2:55 PM

Jeremy Bostron's Blog said:

# May 17, 2004 3:36 PM

travis said:

I sent my pic & stuff, but I forgot a link to my blog: http://travis.servebeer.com/blog.net/
# May 17, 2004 12:53 PM

Mael Straggiotti said:

Hi Chad,

My name is Mael and I live in Geneva, Switzerland, I'm using VS since first .Net beta came out. I greatly appreciate the productivity level I reach with Vsnet. I'm using c# on Winforms and ASP.Net project. I'm a bit disapointed with the performance issues using VS on "large" solutions (RAM usage and designers loading times...). Also, my dear designer, stop playing badly with my code

The most wanted improvement I'm looking for is edit and continue for c# debugging. It really helps when you work alone on project where there is short time between users/customers request and implementation of the feature.

I tried the community preview of Whidbey, which seems to bring really cool design, templating and refactoring features.

Anyway, thanks for your great work !

# May 17, 2004 1:02 PM

Kristian Kristensen's Blog said:

Har du sendt dit
billede til Chad fra VS.NET teamet?
# May 17, 2004 5:04 PM

Philip Wheat said:

Hi Chad,
My name is Philip Wheat and I'm a consultant in Austin Tx. Up until Visual Studio .Net (retroactively Visual Studio.Net 2002) I was a Delphi developer – and very happy to be so. Then I got my hands on a beta of VS.Net – and haven’t looked back since. I currently do custom application development with ASP.Net in C#, and custom Web Part development for Sharepoint. I do some Windows service development, but so far a WinForms project hasn’t made it on the launch list.

My biggest problem with VS.Net is that for VS.Net 2002, VS.Net 2003, and now VS.Net 2005 – I’ve had a long period where I’ve got the tools and can’t use them on projects because they haven’t been released yet. :-) The ASP.Net page designer has hand problems for a while, but 2005 looks like it fixes that (no promises until gold build.) I guess the biggest technical wart on VS.Net isn’t in VS.Net – it’s VSS. You now have WSS – give us something official based off of a Sharepoint Template. It would take us at least a couple of weeks to start complaining about wanting more features after that! :-)
# May 17, 2004 8:45 PM

Lefi Dalløkken said:

Hi Chad, my name is Espen and I'm a bi-lingual coder. I code Java and C#. Previously it's always been a pain to use the Java IDE's when you've worked with VS for a while. The last year this has changed. With the introduction of IntelliJ, Visual Studio had to take the back seat for a while. The way IntelliJ assist you while coding is like nothing I've ever seen befor.
Especailly these features I'd like to see in VS:
- popup namespaces import suggestions when you've typed a class name in your C# class
- the ability to press a hotkey, and write a class name, then press enter and you get the class in the editor
- basic refactoring support
- automaticaly rename class names when renaming files should be at least an option
- update all refrences to a class when renaming (this includes ASPX files, etc etc)
- when working with ASPX pages, please please make Visual Studio stoping ruining the HTML!! it's impossible to write any kind of validated markup when using Visual Studio.

by adding these feature VS might be able to get back on top of the IDE list.
# May 17, 2004 11:44 PM

Sorin Dolha said:

Hello my name is Sorin Dolha, I'm a Software Architect, Application/Solution Developer [MCAD, MCSD .NET], and speaking about the long-term, I work for multiple companies.

I currently work as a Software Consultant at the Linkvest [Microsoft Certified Partner] software company in Renens/Lausanne, Switzerland. The company is developing a Microsoft .NET-based solution for UBP, an International bank with local filiales in Switzerland.

I have been using Visual Studio .NET since the first beta releases (I was by that time working as an Application Developer at a local software company in my city, Cluj-Napoca, Romania). I have created very many projects using Visual Studio .NET, but I also have previous experience on Visual J++ 6 (which I loved very much before .NET), Visual Basic 6 and Visual C++ 6. However, at this moment, my love is Visual Studio .NET and I wouldn't give it for anything else, except for newer versions of the same product.

I'm a very enthusiastic person when it comes to software technologies, and especially software development technologies. I am/was a beta tester for multiple other products too (SQL Server Reporting Services, Office 2003, MSN Premium are only the latest examples). I cannot wait to see C# Generics, and all other C# 2.0 enchancements, ASP .NET 2.0 enchancements, then ObjectSpaces which will truly enchance current ADO technologies, starting with Visual Studio .NET 2005 (formerly referred to as "Whidbey"), but I'm even more enthusiastic about the 2006-2009 Longhorn wave and what it means for developing applications. The new unified Windows-based/Web-based application model that I can read about in MSDN is completely driving me into the 99th heaven. I can't wait for the beta products, which I'm sure I will install directly on my personal machine, despite the warning that it may crash or so. It doesn't matter. I want to have the latest technology as soon as available, and if I can find bugs in the technology while working for my own projects I will be glad to help development teams at Microsoft and therefore contribute to make the Microsoft software development tools even better.
# May 18, 2004 3:18 AM

Luke Hutteman said:

Hi Chad, my name is Luke and I'm a systems architect/developer using both Java and C#. I completely agree with Espen that when it comes to pure code, IntelliJ IDEA beats VS.NET hands down. There are many major things in IDEA missing in VS.NET (extensive refactoring support and dynamic error- and warning-highlighting for instance), as well as so many of the little things that make a developer's life easier (like hitting [ENTER] in the middle of a string and having it insert the quotes and + for you). You may want to take a look at their ReSharper plugin for a small sampling of IDEA functionality currently missing in VS.NET.

One of my pet-peeves with VS.NET is that it's very mouse-oriented: many features seem unaccessible by keyboard. Some of these features are actually available through keyboard shortcuts, but this is not indicated anywhere. Take for instance "go to definition" in the editor popup-menu. Why does it not have F12 as the keyboard-shortcut hint in the popup menu? Or how do I get to the member-dropdown at the top-right without having to take my hands off the keyboard?

I eventually found F12 through the keyboard options-dialog, which brings me to another pet-peeve of mine: why are these dialogs all fixed size? Especially one like keyboard-options (which contains a very lengthy list-box - some categorization may be helpful there too) could really benefit from being resizable.

A last request would be some kind of "tip of the day" popup upon startup to advertise some hidden features of VS.NET people may not be familiar with. (of course with a checkbox to turn this off for advanced users who'd rather not be bothered...). When I say "hidden" features, I mean don't put in stuff like "Select Edit|Copy to copy text to the clipboard", but little known things like Ctrl-I for Incremental search, how to use the command-window, or how to have VS.NET auto-insert stub-methods for an interface you're implementing. When done right, stuff like this can help users discover parts of VS.NET they may not be familiar with yet. I'm sure there are many of such areas for me and a "tip of the day" to highlight them would definitely be useful.
# May 18, 2004 7:34 AM

Luke Hutteman said:

I'm sorry - I forgot to answer your main question of what I do with your product. I use it for intranet ASP.NET development and a little-known WinForms app called SharpReader :-)

And to end on positive note, the VS.NET visual designers for both WinForms and ASP.NET are way better than anything I've seen in the Java world.
# May 18, 2004 7:40 AM

Sara Ford's WebLog said:

# May 18, 2004 1:54 PM

Kathleen Dollard's Blog said:

# May 18, 2004 11:17 PM

Peter wright said:

Hi Chad,

I'm a .NET evangelist with a London consultancy, and a .NET author with Apress. Everything I do, day and night, revolves around helping our consultants deliver best of breed solutions in every sense as quickly and painlessly as possible. As an author, my job is of course to show the world not only how great VS.NET is, but also how easy it is to adopt and start delivering killer applications with.

Keep up the good work guys,

Pete Wright
# May 20, 2004 2:49 AM

Craig Skibo's WebLog said:

# May 20, 2004 5:59 PM

Craig Skibo's WebLog said:

# May 20, 2004 6:09 PM

Craig Skibo's WebLog said:

# May 20, 2004 6:11 PM

chadr's skewed perspective said:

# May 20, 2004 7:41 PM

chadr's skewed perspective said:

# May 20, 2004 7:44 PM

scooblog by josh ledgard said:

# May 20, 2004 10:06 PM

chadr's skewed perspective said:

# May 21, 2004 12:39 AM

Chris Stepaniuk said:

Chad,

What can i say, i, like you, am quite happy Visual Studio .NET doesn't try to auto-correct my name.

I'd have to say the feature i want to see in VS.NET is XML comments for VB.NET, better IntelliSense for C#, with VB.NET it's everywhere. Have the web.config file checked when the project compiles, and not spit really crypic error messages at me if a forget an />.

Like many posters up here, hidden features of VS.NET on start-up would be cool.

Better Debuggin experience. When i am debugging, and i wiggle over an object, i don't want to see the memory address or the class name, i want the data inside. Maybe a smart tag or something like that.

Chris
# May 23, 2004 11:23 PM

Santhosh said:

I used VS.NET 2002 for product development. I wanted to report a bug at MSDN day (that happened in our organisation, but your people were too busy to listen me...). Let me come to the problem.

This occurs when you use Visual Source Safe 6.0 with the VS.NET 2002. I was developing a application which consume the webservice developed by me. My team mate had checked-out the project , which had the Web-reference.

But when I right-clicked the web reference folder, and then on 'Update Web-reference', instead of saying the web reference file is checked-out, it tries to update the file and throws me a dialog box. The dialog box contains the classical error message 'VS.NET has incurred a problem..do you want to report this to MS' and closes the VS.NET environment.

(hope i was clear, in case you need more input from my side, do mail me to ssanttos AT chn.cognizant.com)
# May 24, 2004 12:03 AM

Simon Clark said:

Hi Chad, I'm a new user to VS and VB.Net. My background has been pure FoxPro for the last 12 years or more, with about 6 more recent years with SQL Server. I wish the VS team had spent more time working with the Fox team and less on trying to make their dev tools better; because they've failed big time.
# May 25, 2004 2:08 AM

chadr's skewed perspective said:

# May 27, 2004 12:14 PM

DotWind Blog said:

# May 27, 2004 12:19 PM

chadr's skewed perspective said:

# May 27, 2004 12:47 PM

scooblog by josh ledgard said:

# May 27, 2004 6:38 PM

Graham Wood said:

Hi Chad,
Im from an Web/ASP background currently working for a local government in UK. Prior to visual studio our preffered environment for design and code was Dreamwaever. Our current design environment is still Dreamweaver but for obvious reasons VS for the code behind.

Specific agonising points that immediately come to mind include the inability to view design mode and html mode at same time (Horizontal splt). The inability to select an object in design mode that automatically highlights the code in the html mode. The lack of intellisense from html mode referencing objects and code in the code behind page. The general clunky feel when selecting objects or selecting specific table rows. Better support for CSS at design time.

And whilst im at it could you have a word with someone in ASP.NET development so its not such a headache in producing W3C standards compliant code with Asp.net.

With all that said in my opinion VS 2003 is the best overall development suite i have ever used.
# June 3, 2004 10:50 AM

Trent Hager said:

Chad,

VS.Net needs 3 key features before I will recomend it as our new development suite.

1. A much more powerful Report Designer (like the one in Microsoft Access).

2. ADO.Net and datasets are cool for disconnect data, but for Intranet or Windows App solutions where connected data is needed for concurrency issues, it really is a show stopper for us for many of our systems.

3. Rapid form and web page design like Macromedia or Access. It is so much more effective to be able to drag fields onto a form or web page like you can in Access or Macromedia versus having to deal with data adapters, connections objects, linking, binding, filling, etc... Most of my developers are very experience in Access for windows applications with SQL backend and they are very very productive. They don't see any benefit to using vs.net for windows apps, most of them find VS.Net a step or two backwards from the Access/SQL way we do things now.

My web developers aslo feel that VS.net for web applications is a step back from macromedia for the same reasons.

The ability to drag and drop fields onto a form or web page and have them bound to the data is very critical for rapid development. There needs to be a way to do this and options to do it unbound also.

Microsoft really missed the boat on rapid development for windows forms and web forms...

We won't be moving to .net until you can do rapid development for windows apps and web apps similar to Access and Macromedia.

Microsoft should also consider adding more of the features found in frontpage for web form formating. VS.Net formating for web pages is also a step backward from frontpage & macromedia.

If Microsoft doesn't get it right in 2005, we are going to upgrade to the new version of Macromedia for web development and leave .net altogether...

I really hope Microsoft gets it right this time and soon. I have always loved microsoft products and consider us a Microsoft shop, but I can't afford to continue waiting or hoping that a rapid web and windows product will eventually come in .net...
# June 9, 2004 8:05 AM

Philip Van Hoof said:


Hi there Chad. So .. you want know me, the user of your software, better.

I am a consultant/developer using and knowing lots of programming environments both for professional and own-use purposes. I have been an active contributor to the Mono project, programmed and maintained multiple opensource projects and contributed to multiple opensource projects.

Most of the times during I use the Microsoft .NET framework for my professional development work (for my job). Yes, I do enjoy it. Most of my projects are mobile applications like PocketPC WinForms ones. This means that I am using the buggy Compact Framework .NET and the even more buggy Winforms-for mobile designers of Visual Studio .NET 2003. In my humble opinion there is stil much work todo n both the Compact Framework itself and Visual Studio .NET 2003's mobile support. I can point Microsoft employees to multiple reproducible bugs in both. Even very severe ones (like disappearing virtual keyboards on the PocketPC FOR NO REASON and random instabilities when using threading and locks)

Using a virtual computer (VMWare) I am currently running Visual Studio .NET 2003 for my .NET developments. I am, however, looking forward to using MonoDevelop for most of my developments. I fear that Microsoft will most likely never support Visual Studio .NET on my preferred platform.

It would be great if Microsoft made it easy to plugin a designer like the current winforms designer. It would make it possible to plugin a designer for WT#, gtk-sharp or glade-sharp in Visual Studio .NET.

Note: You can find pictures of me :) on my website.

# June 17, 2004 5:34 AM

Chua Wen Ching said:

Hi there. I use Visual Studio .NET 2003 to push smart card libraries in my company. I specialized in c#. Can't wait for vs.net 2005.
# June 17, 2004 8:11 PM

Brian Schwab said:

Am I missing something? I have a number of migration woes.

-My macros for vc++6.0 won't work anymore, I'd have to rewrite them.
-In v.6.0 I could assign the numpad keys to things, but not anymore?


Please help.
Thanks,
Brian
bschwab@scea.com
# July 26, 2004 3:31 PM

TrackBack said:

We were hanging out in building 41 in Microsoft's headquarters the other day and saw a wall of customers' photos and a bit about what they were using Visual Studio for. So, we tracked down the guy responsible, Chad Royal, lead program manager, and got

# June 22, 2007 6:26 AM

TrackBack said:

We were hanging out in building 41 in Microsoft's headquarters the other day and saw a wall of customers' photos and a bit about what they were using Visual Studio for. So, we tracked down the guy responsible, Chad Royal, lead program manager, and got

# June 4, 2008 8:51 AM
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