Now that I've gotten the Pack Installer project is well underway, my next major task is to create a roadmap for some of our future Power Toys developments in the Developer Solutions team. I've gone through some of our internal databases of suggestions and bugs from Visual Studio, and I've found a few good ideas, but I'm not sure that I really have enough. So as always I'd like to open things up to the community for suggestions about what we should do next.

I'm currently looking for ideas that fit into two categories. The first is "IDE Enhancements"; tools in this category make the Visual Studio 2005 IDE better in some way. The best example of an IDE Enhancement is our Visual Studio Command Shell. This tool adds a new window to Visual Studio that gives you the power of the command prompt from within the VS environment.

The second category is "Platform Tools"; tools in this category are a little harder to define. This category contains tools that help development on the Visual Studio platform. I don't really have a good example of one off the top of my head, but if I think of one I'll post it.

So, within those broad categories of tools what exactly are we looking to do? Well here's part of our team's description from our internal homepage:

"The Developer Solutions team is all about making developers more successful and satisfied with Microsoft's developer products. This means delivering great developer " Power Toys" that solve specific customer pain points with our developer products. It also means making sure there are healthy Microsoft support communities to answer broad questions.  Lastly, it means providing best practices for user-created communities to share code samples, whitepapers, libraries, and tool development."

The two important points are that the tools we build need to make you, the user, more satisfied with our products, and two help eliminate pain points that you may be having. In practical terms this means that we're looking for tools that help resolve issues that are hard to work around, or fill gaps in functionality offered by Visual Studio. We aren't so much able to fix bugs with our tools, but we may be able to help provide tools that allow you to work around things.

Here are my questions to you my loyal readers:

  1. What areas of Visual Studio give you the most trouble or could use more functionality to help you do your job?
  2. Are there specific tools that you think Visual Studio should have that are maybe outside the mainstream of Visual Studio development?

Keep in mind that we like to have tools that can be Alpha'ed or Beta'ed within a month or two. I'm looking to fill out a roadmap going forward of about 6 months or so, so I will be scheduling more than one tool out of this.

If your suggestion gets picked as something we want to work on, I will make sure that we can include you in the process of specifying the solution as early and as frequently as possible.

How can you submit your suggestions to me? As always leaving a blog comment or using the contact link to send me mail directly are perfectly fine suggestions. Another great way is to use the Microsoft Connect website. From there you can log bugs about Visual Studio, or as is more appropriate in this case, suggestions about what we should do.

If you go to the Connect site, search for your suggestion first to make sure it hasn't already been entered. If it hasn't, go on ahead to the Suggestion Submission Form. On the form you'll need to enter some details. To make it easy to find in the database once its logged, prefix your problem title with Power Toy Suggestion, also set the "Version" and "Where did you encounter the problem?" drop downs to "Other".

It would also be handy to leave a comment here if you do use Connect, just so I can know when to start looking in the database for your suggestions.

I'm looking forward to all your great ideas!

-Jeremy