I had a great time today working in the Microsoft Pavilion for the Microsoft.com Community team. I had a lot of interesting conversations with customers about how they use community to help them do their jobs (and to have fun, meet people, etc.). What I'm trying to discover is: -What does community mean to you? -What are your goals as you interact with community? -What are the features, sites, etc. you currently use to help you meet these goals? -How could these features, sites, etc. be better? One obvious answer is excellent search: our customers want to do their jobs efficiently and effectively and great search results go a long way toward helping that. People also use of lot of the other standard community features: chat, blogs, newsgroups, forums. I've provided links to our offering there but that shouldn't imply that these are the only sites people use. In fact, I want to be sure I understand what the best community sites are for people and why.

One thing I'm hearing consistently is how important it is for people to be able to find and interact with experts on a specific technology. A good time to remind people about our MVP program. Also an important reminder that we need to do a great job in community with making it easy to for people to find each other and get together to solve problems or just have fun. I actually got a chance to meet and talk with Francois Bonin, a developer from Ghana who's doing great work developing .NET community in Africa.

I spent some time talking to my good friend Curt Johnson from Addison-Wesley. I'm really excited about two of their new books: Build Master and Framework Design Guidelines. Build Master covers configuration management and is written by Vincent Maraia who's had years of experience shipping products at Microsoft. Framework Design Guidelines covers API and Framework design and is written by two guys who have had tons of experience doing this through their work on the .NET Class Libraries. This is an area in which I'm really looking to develop my skills so I'm looking forward to reading this one.

I also got a chance to catch up with Josh Truppin from MSDN Magazine. I've known Josh for years; both indirectly through reading the MSJ magazine before I came to Microsoft and directly during my years at MSDN. Josh was showing off his newish Nikon digital which still didn't have the key feature I've been looking for: making a picture of me look good :)

Tonight the obligatory rounds of parties begin; <sigh>I guess I'll have to attend a few. I'm actually having dinner with the Band on the Runtime guys and that will be excellent.

See you tomorrow at Booth #36 at the Microsoft Pavilion.

George