A View from Elsewhere : Express

"VS 2008 SP1 Doesn't Patch VS Express"

johnmont — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 19:56:20 GMT

A customer noted yesterday that the patch for "big VS" (that is, Visual Studio 2008 Standard, Professional, and Visual Studio Team Suite) doesn't patch Visual Studio Express. We did this because of the patch size: in the past Express customers would download one of the Express products (probably 50-60MB) and then have to apply the full VS patch (typically over 200MB). So we decided that we would do what we call a "major release" of Express 2008 with SP1. Effectively, rather than creating a separate service pack, we added the features of the service pack to the full Express SKU -- we used to call this "slipstreaming" but I've been told that's not quite the right term. Most Express users will just download the Express SKU of their choice: if they already have a VS Express 2008 RTM SKU on their computer, we'll upgrade it. If they don't, they get the full SKU without having to install a separate service pack.

Technorati Tags: Visual Studio Express,Service Pack

VS 2008 Beta 2 Express Editions

johnmont — Sat, 28 Jul 2007 01:50:06 GMT

Available now along with the Coding4Fun Developer Kit. We've upgraded the Popfly team to using VSTS 2008 beta 2 as well.

Technorati Tags: Visual Studio, Express

Welcome to Popfly

johnmont — Fri, 18 May 2007 18:47:00 GMT

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 enables you to connect VS to Popfly.

This is a simple example of a Popfly creation: it's a mashup between the pictures of cats from Flickr, and our "Whack-a-Mole" block.

WPF Patches for VC# and VB Express Orcas Ready

johnmont — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 02:03:00 GMT

Updated

Thanks for waiting: the patch that will enable VB Express and VC# Express April CTP to create WPF applications is available.

VC# Express: http://download.microsoft.com/download/8/2/6/8267fa5a-e725-4bb8-850a-2f5fee4702db/OrcasVCSAprilCTPWPFPatch.EXE

VB Express: http://download.microsoft.com/download/a/8/c/a8c65b33-600a-4ebc-9310-fc0845a892a2/MicrosoftVisualBasicExpressOrcasAprilCTPWPFPatch.EXE

Visual Studio Express Orcas Available

johnmont — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 20:48:00 GMT

The first Community Technology Preview of all four Visual Studio Express "Orcas" products are available for download now. You can go to Channel 9 to see Soma's video, or just go to http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/future to download and install. I’m incredibly interested in your feedback on these four products, especially on the DLINQ designer and the WPF designer, which are two new features we would like to introduce in Orcas. Your feedback on whether they’re easy to use will help us shape what goes into this release.

That said, this is the first time in the Orcas release cycle that we’ve posted this software for your feedback so there are a few rough edges. The big issue I ran into was that the WPF designer (code-named "Cider") needs to be patched on VB Express and VC# Express. We're working on getting the patch up on the web site and I expect it to be available RSN (really soon now). This patch just inserts a couple of registry keys that we found were missing very late in the ship cycle.

So please download and check them out. If you have problems try the MSDN forums. If you want to submit a bug or a suggestion, try the MSDN feedback center.

RTB Finished

johnmont — Thu, 14 Dec 2006 09:09:55 GMT

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 well, with Adam Nathan delivering a stellar demo and Paramesh (my PUM) delivering a stellar slide deck. For my part, I delivered some stellar one-liners. (Everyone has to add value in their own way.)

Now, with one set of questions answered and yet another set to answer, we can proceed into the new calendar year.

US Imagine Cup: Not Just Algorithms

johnmont — Thu, 19 Oct 2006 19:42:06 GMT

One of the largest challenges facing CS students is the transition from being a CS student to writing production code in a work environment for a living. Historically programming challenges have focused more on CS-student-oriented work, but this year the Imagine Cup in the US is broadening out.

Students will be given a spec and told to implement it. When they are done, they will submit their DLL to an engine created by my old friend Ed Kaim's company, which will then run it through a battery of NUnit unit tests and award points based on the functionality, reliability, and performance. This process will culminate with a week in Redmond where the top competitors are placed in teams and duke it out by implementing a real-world solution.

Information about the contest is here, and about the Imagine Cup in general is here.

Job Descriptions

johnmont — Fri, 30 Jun 2006 18:03:00 GMT

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 one. What would make it better?

Software Development Engineer

10 PRINT "This is way cool"

20 GOTO 10

Does this look like your first program? At any given time, there are about 25 million people going through the same thing. The Non-Professional Tools Team (NPT) is a startup team focused on building a set of tools for these customers. Our team has a simple charter: create a wave of hobbyist and student developers using Microsoft technologies by making programming fun, rewarding and cool.

We’re creating a next-generation development experience for hobbyists, students, and novices – something where programming is fun and getting started is simple. This means exploring new UI paradigms, leveraging the latest advances in programming languages, and creating a collection of domain-specific frameworks and libraries that make it easy to create cool experiences with animations and rich graphics that cross online and offline scenarios as well as different devices, browsers, and applications.

We’re a small team with minimal process overhead committed to steering clear of big oil tankers and to shipping software quickly. In fact, we’re driving to ship something once a week to keep the community buzz going, which means we need to get much smarter about how we design, build, and test software. Come help make us smarter.

This startup team needs a smart, customer-focused developer to create a range of solutions and experiences, and to enable us to become the most nimbly shipping product both on-cycle and off-cycle.

The candidate must have a have a BS or MS, and at least 5 years of commercial software programming in C or C++. The candidate needs a working knowledge of C#, Javascript, and ASP.NET. You will also need strong communication skills and the ability to effectively manage cross-group relationships. There’s lots of room for growth in this startup team, so get on board early.

NPT Team Charter

johnmont — Thu, 29 Jun 2006 18:31:00 GMT

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 momentum of the current Visual Studio Express products. With nearly 5 million downloads, and 600,000 unique registrants, these products have become more popular than we ever anticipated. Our first goal is to deliver an amazing release with the “Orcas” wave of Visual Studio by working with the partner teams and building some amazing content to surround the Express products.
The next task is to create a strong community of non-professional developers. There are around 27 million of them, so that’s no easy task. We’ll start by building on existing developer communities – both Microsoft and non-Microsoft – to create a strong network of communities, but our goal is to create a community phenomenon more like Myspace, YouTube, or Flickr – a place where people go to share and have fun. Creating this community is going to drive us to create a set of services for storing and sharing source code, ratings, comments, and for buying and selling software.
Finally, we see the need for a new kind of development experience for this customer – something where programming is fun and getting started is simple. We want to reach out to novices and intermediate hobbyist developers with support for the programming languages they already know. We want to offer a host of domain-specific frameworks and libraries that make it easy to create cool experiences with animations and rich graphics that cross online and offline scenarios as well as different devices, browsers, and applications.

It’s a pretty broad charter, but I think we can deliver on it. In fact, based on some of the prototypes we have already, I know we can.

Non-Pro Tools Team PUM

johnmont — Wed, 28 Jun 2006 17:03:00 GMT

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 excited. I’ve worked with Paramesh before as his marketing team for Visual J#, Visual Studio Tools for Devices, and even for things like the Object Test Bench. He’s an incredibly nice person and pretty on the ball (I mean, for management ;-).

I still have a couple of months to play before management arrives – he starts September 1^st – but I’m very happy to have a full time manager.

Boy, I never thought I’d say that.

What We’re Doing: Cool Tools

johnmont — Tue, 27 Jun 2006 23:32:00 GMT

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, teaching them along the way about things like methods, classes, events, properties, loops, and conditionals. It sounds boring, but the implementation he’s come up with is pretty amazing – awesome to look at and really amazingly easy to use. I’m hoping that we get it to a point where we can post it publicly pretty soon so we can show some of the thinking we’ve been doing, but for right now we’re heads down on getting it to a point where it satisfies our core scenarios.

Adam Nathan Joins Non-Pro Tools Team

johnmont — Tue, 27 Jun 2006 17:59:00 GMT

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 Adam was the right guy when, on the weekend between leaving his former team and joining the NPT team, he wrote a prototype IDE based on a casual conversation we had. Basically, I said something offhand and about three days later he had it running, “Just to see if I could do it.”

We’ve been building on it ever since.

We Have a Name: NPT

johnmont — Mon, 26 Jun 2006 16:36:00 GMT

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 working on tools for hobbyists and novices and still working on creating some services. Only the name has changed.

After HTML and Javascript, C++

johnmont — Fri, 26 May 2006 00:58:00 GMT

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 US-only). I would have expected VB or maybe a dynamic language. Or even C (which showed up much farther down the list).

Well, at least it surprised *me*.

An Express Web Page Editor?

johnmont — Wed, 10 May 2006 18:03:00 GMT

Do we need a complement to Visual Web Developer Express (i.e. a free, simplified Web page editor) that is aimed at the HTML jockey? If so, what features should it have?

The big question for me on this one is where a sitebuilder (the Web-based configuration utilities most hosters give you to select the features you want on your site and set the background) leaves off and where a tool begins.