10 PRINT "Hello World"
Another day, and another website surfaces out of the vast primeval soup of bits and bytes that make up the internet. This one won't help you put together that IKEA flat-pack, and contains no exciting facts about pottery - but should still hopefully bring some real benefit into your life. If I'm wasting your time, then I'm wasting my time - so please feed back about anything we're doing which you don't like, or anything we're not doing that you would.
But wait, I'm getting ahead of myself. Who are you? Who am I? What am I doing - and why on earth should you care?
You
With a bit of luck, you're a geek - you might not like Star Trek or Warhammer, but you're probably involved in building software in some way. You're also probably using Microsoft technology, or at least interested in seeing what it can do. Problem is, there's rather a lot of technology out there nowadays, far more than you can keep up with. It all makes wonderful promises but...what's best for you? What's going to really make a difference to the applications you write?
It's not just technology either - there's a raft of architectural buzzwords out there now too - should you be building a software + services application? Perhaps you need a Rich Interactive Application. Do you want to support every PC ever made, or just one particular box your engineers spent days settings up? Probably not, but it's interesting to see exactly were in the middle of those two extremes you fit - and what technologies and strategies you should use once you work that out.
Sounds tricky. What shall we do?
Me
I'm 'Microsoft'. I know about Microsoft things, and I like playing with them, and talking about them. I'm also a real person called Ian, I like cats and dancing (not combined) and many, many other things. There's another chap named Dave in our team, and he likes things, and does things too - I'll let him say hi later.
In terms of what you (hopefully) care about, we're a couple of guys who've spent lots of time talking to ISVs (Independent Software Vendors - people who make stuff) about all the sorts of questions I mentioned just now. We like to tell ourselves (and our managers) that we know a fair bit about taking these choices and putting these designs together - and we'd like to share some of the things we speak about, and find out about, with you.
How?
Naturally you'll already have read my answer to What Is A Virtual Design Review Anyway?, so I'll simply give you a little insight as to our shorter term plans. We're going to be looking for some interesting folks, some people like you to come and join us. We'll provide the coffee and bacon baps, if you'll provide an insight into what you do, and what problems you've got. We'll then chat to you about what we think might work best for you, what design would look good and what technologies would get the job done. We're not going to try and sell anything - so you can leave the corporate chequebook at home.
Given that we're handing out coffee and not getting any sales in return - what exactly is it that we get out of this? Well, we want to take your problems, issues and tough choices and share them out with the wider world. Naturally we're not going to tell the internet about your internal tools, market strategy or sales plans - but we do want to tell them that you had a problem with turning your application into one that customers didn't have to host themselves. Then, we want to tell them our thoughts on the subject. Maybe we'll get a really clever chap here, who knows a lot about the problem, to stand in front of a whiteboard and we'll film him talking about the problem.
Once we've done all this, we'll share it back out again, so that people like you can come and read it, and benefit - and make cooler stuff that does more things than it did before, that does them better and that you were able to make and maintain easier and faster.
I like stuff. I like making stuff. I like helping people make stuff. I like seeing stuff people have made. With a bit of luck, this mite of dust on the mammoth World Wide Web might help some people make some stuff. Here's hoping.
