Whidbey is over... What are you doing now?
Recently I have been asked by many family and friends what I am doing at work now that we have shipped Whidbey. Some speculate that we are diving into Orcas, some think Orcas is complete and we are working on Hawaii, while others seem to think we are on a big break for the next few months.
While I can’t answer this question for everyone I can answer it for my self and most of the developer division (there may be some people going on vacation for a while, so I can’t speak for them). The developer division as a whole is working on MQ.
What is MQ?
MQ is a milestone that is post-Whidbey and pre-Orcas that will focus on quality. We have learned a lot from the previous 3 versions of Visual Studio that were built around the .NET Framework, the biggest lesson that we learned on this most recent version was that we were not agile enough and we took too long to ship.
This milestone while it will not answer everything it gives the division time to analyze its processes and make improvements. Every team (just like a business) has areas that it would like to improve, but hasn’t been able to in the past when there is code churn and deadlines looming.
I really think that MQ is a great step in the right direction and I believe that as a customer you will see this throughout the Orcas product cycle.
MQ is cool… but what are YOU doing?
During MQ I will be working on various divisional and product unit proposals. As a rule of thumb all divisional proposals take precedence over all other work in MQ. This is because we feel that an approved divisional proposal will have a greater impact on the overall product then something specific to a product unit or feature crew.
The main task that I am trying to tackle for the C# Language Services (C# IDE) team is answering our code coverage story and being sure that our story properly aligns with the divisional story. I'll plan to write more about other projects that I am involved with and the experiences I encounter as time goes on.
If you have questions about MQ feel free to ask and I'll do my best to answer.
