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March 2006 - Posts

Why Enable Broad Community Owned Moderation?

Posted Friday, March 31, 2006 10:12 AM by jledgard
We get some push back from folks who worry about handing over control of our communities to the community itself on http://forums.microsoft.com/msdn . I personally believe it's vital to our success that we trust the community to have control over it's Read More...
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When will other products be as responsive?

Posted Thursday, March 30, 2006 8:57 AM by jledgard
Here is a mail from one of my blog readers about our responsiveness during Whidbey. I'm hoping that our product groups will be just as, if not more, responsive during Orcas. Want to know how to increase your teams customer sat... -----Original Message----- Read More...
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See cool tools on Channel9; Meet the people you could be working with!

Posted Wednesday, March 29, 2006 10:32 AM by jledgard
A great deal of job satisfaction comes from ones like of the folks they work with. Check out the sprint retrospective we shot 6 weeks ago for Channel9 . If the job content sounds like an interest match and you'd like to subject yourself to working with Read More...
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Are Tech Support Sites like Asp.net and MSDN Forums Sticky?

Posted Tuesday, March 28, 2006 9:52 AM by jledgard
I hear from some folks inside Microsoft that sites like the MSDN forums aren't "sticky", that people don't keep coming back to form a "community", and that they are purely transactional in nature. I don't buy these statements one bit. Here is someone Read More...
12 Comments

Did you go to your 10 year HS reunion?

Posted Monday, March 27, 2006 9:21 AM by jledgard
Does anyone know if / when we’ll have our 10 year high school reunion Sara Ford's WebLog : Will we have a 10 year high school reunion... . I’ve chosen to skip my 10 year reunion. I figure that the people I wanted to keep in touch with… Read More...
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IE Team takes the next step... opens a real feedback channel

Posted Sunday, March 26, 2006 6:44 AM by jledgard
The IE team announced yesterday that they are taking the next step into real customer connection. They opened a public bug database ! Great work guys! I wonder what group at Microsoft gave them that idea and helped proved that it could work? I'm super Read More...
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Your site is very informational for me. Nice work.

Posted Saturday, March 25, 2006 6:16 PM by jledgard
I'm not sure blog spammers are very smart. They need to be more sneaky when trying to get a message through. Take the recent run of Mortgage Loan spam we've been getting on blogs.msdn.com. It looks at though they trying to post the same message to my Read More...
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Via: Xbox 360 Fanboy - MS exec hints at Halo spin-off?

Posted Friday, March 24, 2006 9:13 AM by jledgard
Could Bungie be planning two Halo games, one continuing the original Covenant blasting storyline and the other a related squad-based strategy game, RPG or RTS? What if the "other" Halo game gets released first? MS exec hints at Halo spin-off? - Xbox 360 Read More...
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PSS Learning #1: IM is a key part of their jobs

Posted Thursday, March 23, 2006 9:42 PM by jledgard
I covered myths #1 and #2 so it's time to start getting into the things I learned while working in Sammamish. Learning #1 is that I never saw so many people depend on IM. Everyone was running Microsoft Office Communicator and they used it. It's was a Read More...
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Bumped by Bill on Channel9

Posted Wednesday, March 22, 2006 9:43 PM by jledgard
It's hard to get on Channel9 lately. They've certainly come a long way from the days of begging and hard networking for content and interviews. We filmed a video of our Scrum retrospective for Developer Solutions with demo's of the first three tools we've Read More...
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Interesting Finds from Slashdot on Coding Communities

Posted Wednesday, March 22, 2006 9:13 PM by jledgard
What communities are you a part of now that help you write and develop software? Slashdot | Coding Communities - What Works? . This was a great discussion because it relates directly to my job and my team. The answers given here were pretty varied, but Read More...
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Joe asks when it is OK to Delete a Post in Forums

Posted Wednesday, March 22, 2006 9:19 AM by jledgard
People who work at Microsoft are very concerned with making sure that we aren’t over-moderating the forums. I can read between the lines: people internally want to make sure that we don’t get accused of censoring the forums. Neither do I. Read More...
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Changed my recent posts to recent team posts

Posted Tuesday, March 21, 2006 6:38 AM by jledgard
I realized that the Developer Solutions team is filled with bloggers. Only our dev lead and tester don't have blogs today. I felt that my recent posts list would be a good way to help promote the other folks on the team so I've tried to be a little less Read More...
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Developer Solutions Sister Team Led by Shawn Burk

Posted Monday, March 20, 2006 9:50 AM by jledgard
Shawn and I met a while back. He’s forming what I’d consider a “sister team” to our “developer solutions” team. Its cool for developers because now there will be two teams doing full time dogfooding building you great Read More...
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Developer Support Myth #2: The phone doesn’t ring off the hook

Posted Saturday, March 18, 2006 6:02 AM by jledgard
At least not in the location I was sitting. In fact the call routing happens off-site, but most calls require one or more call-backs with developer support. I discovered rare for a developer issue to be resolved in the true "1st contact". Like I said Read More...
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Two devs walk into a PM office

Posted Friday, March 17, 2006 9:46 PM by jledgard
And you, as the PM, typicaly expect them to ask a clarifying design question of some sort. Here's the question I recevied Monday... "Do you know where we could purchase sulfur or some other sort of fart smelling substance?" Now, its a PM job responcibility Read More...
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Find msdn bloggers with category clouds!

Posted Thursday, March 16, 2006 8:40 PM by jledgard
With over 2,600 bloggers on MSDN its hard to find the bloggers that interest you. I've heard consistently that blog discover ability is a HUGE problem on this site so I wanted to do something about it... but how can you possibly categorize that many bloggers? Read More...
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Developer Support Myth #1: PSS is Cheaper than Prod-Dev Time

Posted Thursday, March 16, 2006 9:16 AM by jledgard
On this edition of "Developer Support myth-busters" I’d like to tackle a popular belief held by several folks that work in product development groups. The belief is that PSS labor is cheaper than dev/test/pm labor. Cost is often used as an argument by Read More...
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My Week at Developer Product Support: A Prelude

Posted Wednesday, March 15, 2006 11:47 AM by jledgard
I’m going to post a few entries on the week I spent with the Developer Support team in Issaquah, WA. This entry is meant as in introduction to this series. The next few entries will try and capture what I learned. Microsoft has a program for employees Read More...
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Great Video on Community Site Development

Posted Wednesday, March 15, 2006 10:58 AM by jledgard
If you are developing a site that involves "community features" then I suggest you watch this whole video that's been posted to Channel9 on the www.on10.net development. One highlight includes how they exposed everything on the site as a set of web services Read More...
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I've been splogged, but will I get paid?

Posted Tuesday, March 14, 2006 9:39 PM by jledgard
Thanks to Lee for forwarding me this, but apparently there are a TON of splogs that think my blog text is worth something ... I have doubts that I'll ever get a cut of the action. :-) Read More...
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A tool by any other name...

Posted Tuesday, March 14, 2006 9:34 AM by jledgard
What's the difference between "Developer Aftermarket Community Solutions", Powertoys, Power Toys, Developer Powertoys, or "Power Toys for Visual Studio? Does it matter? I'm under the beleif that as long as we consistenty ship cool, useful stuff that people Read More...
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On10.Net looks like it has potential

Posted Monday, March 13, 2006 9:12 AM by jledgard
I'll be really interested to see what the next few shows published to http://www.on10.net/ are like. In this case (more so than channel9) the original content is really going to be king since the site really flows around this content and doesn't contain Read More...
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Building a killer forum reputation system

Posted Monday, March 13, 2006 9:08 AM by jledgard
Joe is breaking apart his vision for Q&A forum reputation system into three phases. At Microsoft the common terminology for this is "crawl, walk, run". The current MSDN forum reputation system, as it exists today, is probably in the "yet to be born" Read More...
5 Comments

Brad Abrams : PM Tip #21: Sanity Will Prevail

Posted Sunday, March 12, 2006 9:22 AM by jledgard
So, next time a “stupid” decision gets made rather than sulking about it, re-examine your case honestly then if you still believe in the vision tell yourself (and others) that sanity will prevail then go work towards making sure it does. Brad Read More...
3 Comments

Happy 2nd Jobsblog-O-Versary

Posted Sunday, March 12, 2006 7:21 AM by jledgard
It was two years ago today that Gretchen and Zoe made the first post to Jobsblog . Just wanted to call it out and wish Gretchen, Jenna, Jim and Zoe...wherever she is :-) ... happy blog-o-versary. I think it was that moment my wife went from "geek by association" Read More...
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Phase 1: Build something to big for your pocket and too small for work

Posted Saturday, March 11, 2006 9:13 AM by jledgard
Scoble says… Yes. The hype got too big too fast. The whole thing just reminds me of a certain South Park episode that’s commonly quotes on Slashdot… Phase 1: Collect Underpants Phase 2: ??? Phase 3: Profit I believe the project has a great amount of potential Read More...
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Community is like a box of chocolates, you never....

Posted Friday, March 10, 2006 9:10 AM by jledgard
I’m a little late to be blogging this, but Joe had a great blog post about the value of web forum based communities for Microsoft. It’s a question we get to answer a lot with old school MSFTies and I’m glad I now have a great post to point them at. …the Read More...
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We haven't even released the source code yet

Posted Wednesday, March 01, 2006 11:31 PM by jledgard
And already people are doing neat things with MSbee. Check out this Testdriven.Net integration with MSbee that allows you to specify which runtime you want to run your tests under for a project. Can't wait to see what people do when we release the source Read More...
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Customer Love for the TFS Admin Tool

Posted Wednesday, March 01, 2006 5:03 PM by jledgard
Via http://spaces.msn.com/wesmacdonald/Blog/cns!25108A9ADA96C9D7!141.entry I was saved today. After configuring users in Team System using three different interfaces, I thought there must be a better way since I could not believe that it could normal Read More...
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