[Michael] I've got a circuitious style - so if you're impatient, you may want to skip this thread. I'm going to talk about one of the big reasons I'm participating in this blog, and what I'm hoping to gain from it. I'm also big on analogies and stories - and as a fan or Robert Fulghum, I hope this one all makes sense in the end.

I went to a physical therapist a while ago - had some pain in my shoulders and arm. I was in a sour mood. Wasn't as productive at work as I wanted to be. I got there and we talked. I complained a lot about my shoulder and arms. Then a funny thing happened. The PT felt around for the tension, listened to what I had to say about that, and we started working on my lower back. After a while, the focus shifted onto my shoulders and arm and neck. However, most of the time was spent on my back. It wasn't until I was there that I realized that my pain was really in my back.

My back had hurt so long that it had stopped registering with my mind that it was a problem. My neck and arms were compensating for the back pain. I'm glad that the PT didn't just work on my neck and arms. If that had been the case, I'd be right back where I started from. But if the PT has just done what I said without establishing a real dialogue with me, we wouldn't have solved my real problem.

There is something different about the information you get from a simple statement and the information you get by "being there" or "being in touch". There is a lot of context missing from one off communication.

This is one of the reasons I hope this blogging experiment will work.

We have charts and graphs and concerns and suggestions filling up databases. We often have more information than we could practically sort through. And we try. But it doesn't tell the whole story. Without the right context, we might not make as good a decision as we could have with the context customers can provide - if there is real dialogue.

Hopefully, by being out here we can establish a useful and meaningful dialog. Blogs seem to be a compromise in a way - they can't scale if everyone who could read one asked a personal question - but hopefully it is a step toward establishing a strong dialog that will provide us and you, our readers, the context to understand each other. And hopefully solve some problems and relieve some customer "pain".
That's what my opinion of the job of Visual Studio is. To make it easier for you guys to write your applications.

Dialog works both ways too. If you don't know what we're doing, or why, then you probably won't be very eager to buy our product. You might feel like we aren't paying attention to your needs. I hope, I really do, that we're spending more of our time working on your problems than your symptoms. Please let us know if that's not the case.