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Welcome to Popfly

Posted Friday, May 18, 2007 8:47 AM by johnmont
Today (that'd be Friday) we're announcing Microsoft Popfly(tm) , which is the project my team has been working on. It's a simple, web-based tool that makes it easy to create mashups, web pages, and so on. We also have a Visual Studio 2005 package that Read More...
3 Comments

RTB Finished

Posted Wednesday, December 13, 2006 10:09 PM by johnmont
One of the meetings that our division inflicts regularly schedules is called "running the business" (formerly they were called "rhythm of the business" but I think someone noticed that we don't got rhythm). Our team had its RTB meeting today. It went Read More...
0 Comments

Job Descriptions

Posted Friday, June 30, 2006 8:03 AM by johnmont
I’ve found that writing job descriptions is harder than I thought. In particular, it’s harder because I’m writing for so many audiences: for the internal developers and PMs who might be interested, the external folks, for other managers, and so on. Here’s Read More...
3 Comments

NPT Team Charter

Posted Thursday, June 29, 2006 8:31 AM by johnmont
After about four months of working through some hard problems, I’ve begun to center our team on a few core work areas. Based a lot on the feedback you gave me through this blog, I narrowed it to three work areas: We’re going to start by building on the Read More...
2 Comments

Non-Pro Tools Team PUM

Posted Wednesday, June 28, 2006 7:03 AM by johnmont
We have a PUM. Paramesh Vaidyanathan who ran the India Developer Center for Developer Division – a team of something like 100 people – has decided he wants to come back to the US to run the Non-Professional Tools Team (NPT – our team). I’m incredibly Read More...
0 Comments

What We’re Doing: Cool Tools

Posted Tuesday, June 27, 2006 1:32 PM by johnmont
While I’ve been running around creating PPTs and sending email, Adam has been working on a prototype development experience that’s designed to take someone with no knowledge of code through to creating simple Web sites with HTML and Javascript or VBscript, Read More...
2 Comments

Adam Nathan Joins Non-Pro Tools Team

Posted Tuesday, June 27, 2006 7:59 AM by johnmont
We have our first developer. Adam Nathan has joined us. If that name sounds familiar, it’s because he’s the soul behind Pinvoke.net , a community site dedicated to getting good coverage of .NET’s Pinvoke functionality (which he largely wrote). I knew Read More...
3 Comments

We Have a Name: NPT

Posted Monday, June 26, 2006 6:36 AM by johnmont
We still need a name for the team. Since none of the ideas we came up with previously seemed to pass the internal sniff test (go figure), I decided that I’d opt for naming it descriptively: the Non-Professional Tools Team, or NPT for short. We’re still Read More...
4 Comments

After HTML and Javascript, C++

Posted Thursday, May 25, 2006 2:58 PM by johnmont
Surprising factoid: after HTML and Javascript, C++ is the language most used by non-professional developers (including students, hobbyists, etc.). This based on some of our internal research over the past 4 years (statistically significant sample, but Read More...
12 Comments

How Did You Learn to Program?

Posted Wednesday, May 03, 2006 7:01 AM by johnmont
How did you learn to program? Especially if you’re not a professional developer and never had been (I already have the data that says that something like 70% of professional developers got degrees in computer science or engineering). I’m wondering how Read More...
19 Comments

Who's the Customer?

Posted Tuesday, May 02, 2006 7:50 AM by johnmont
Who is the target user for our non-professional tools? In order to make smarter decisions about what we build, we need to understand that the customer we’re building this product for doesn’t fit a single profile. Off the top of my head, I can think of Read More...
5 Comments

Principles for First-Use Tools

Posted Monday, May 01, 2006 8:02 AM by johnmont
Even as we’re working out the potential features for the next version of Visual Studio Express, we’re looking beyond that. Express has done an amazing job (5M downloads!) of getting development tools into the hands of many people. The feedback we’ve gotten Read More...
4 Comments

The Non-Professional Team

Posted Thursday, April 06, 2006 8:02 AM by johnmont
I work on the non-professional team. No, this doesn’t mean that we come to work late, drink heavily on the job, and dress in fuzzy slippers and bathrobes (though there have been times…). This means that, unlike the bulk of the rest of the Visual Studio Read More...
6 Comments
 
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