Are you passionate about helping to address the challenges that face professional developers?  Do you have a technical background and innate marketing savvy?  Then we need to talk.

I'm building a team that will be responsible for marketing VS Standard, VS Professional, and VSTO.  This will also include all of the language marketing.  I'm looking to fill a couple of open positions.

The first challenge for which I'm hiring is the strategy and programs to help developers who are working with v6 versions of Visual Basic and Visual C++ to upgrade to Visual Studio 2005.  As anybody who reads this blog realizes, there's been a lot of interest in this area over the past year and it continues to be extremely important to Microsoft.  See more details in the first job description below(Job Number 152697 on the www.microsoft.com/careers).

The second challenge is for which I'm hiring is the Product Manager for Visual Studio Tools for Office.  As anybody who's used VSTO 2005 can tell, Microsoft is investing heavily in this area.  Do you have ideas on how to make Microsoft Office part of every developer's toolkit?  Then we need to talk.  See more details in the second job description below.  (Job number 152699 on www.microsoft.com/careers)

Both of these jobs are based in Redmond.

Does any of this sound interesting?  Then mail me with the subject "Cool Marketing Job".

Product Manager: Visual Studio

Are you passionate about working with millions of developers worldwide to address business and technical challenges? Do you have a desire to understand how Microsoft’s technology integrates with customers’ businesses? Do you have the technical skills to explain SOA to a developer and the business skills to explain the value proposition to managers? Do you love being on stage and presenting to audiences of all sizes?

Join one of the most exciting teams at Microsoft and work on driving the success of two of the best known developer products in an established, proven organization. As a product manager charged with helping Visual Basic 6.0 and Visual C++ v6.0 developers to upgrade to Visual Studio 2005, you will take complete ownership of one of the most significant technical and business opportunities in the developer world. You’ll have ownership of the upgrade strategy, product and technical marketing, and driving opportunities with both developers and IT Decision Makers.

Responsibilities include but are not limited to:

·     Defining and executing programs to encourage more than 1.5 million developers to upgrade to Visual Studio 2005.

·     Owning all aspects of product management relating to Visual Basic 6.0 and Visual C++ 6.0.

·     Building field-ready training and value proposition materials

·     Nourishing an ecosystem of industry partners to build joint programs focused on developer upgrade.

·     Creating worldwide marketing and technical collateral.

·     Working with the product team to create and disseminate technical content.

·     Being a rock star presenter who is able to demo the product on stage with senior executives worldwide

Education and Experience:

3-5 years of Programmer or working in Developer Organization.

Bachelor's degree(B.S/B.A) or MBA preferred.

Product Manager: Visual Studio Tools for Office

Are you passionate about development and building new markets that could impact millions of developers? Are you excited about touching the lives of millions of users around the world? Do you have the desire to help integrate Microsoft technology with customers’ business needs? Do you love being on stage and presenting to audiences of all sizes?

Join one of the most exciting teams at Microsoft and drive the success of a highly-visible technology in an established, proven organization. As a product manager charged driving Office development and application customization using Visual Studio, you will take complete ownership of strategic planning, product and technical marketing, and customer readiness for Visual Studio Tools for Office.

You will work closely with the product development team and be responsible for:

·     Driving strategic product planning for building a new developer market

·     Working across the Office and Tools groups to ensure that Microsoft delivers on the “better together” message.

·     Working closely with customers and partners to define scenario-based requirements for future versions.

·     Driving customer and partner requirements into the product plan and maintaining strong advocacy for their needs.

·     Representing developer tools products around the world with multiple audiences, both external and internal: press, analysts, customers and partners, including delivering technical presentations at conferences and customer and partner sites.

·     Executing market research and analysis, technology assessment, and competitive analysis.

·     Creating messaging and positioning for partners and customers.

·     Building the go to market strategy and execution.

·     Arming the Microsoft field with targeted content, demos, and resources.

Ideal candidates will be former developers or programmers.

Education and Experience:

3-5 years of working in Developer organization

Education:

Bachelor’s Degree (B.S./B.A.)

MBA

Almost five months ago, we launched VBRun: the Visual Basic 6.0 Resource Center.  Since then quite a few of you have visited the site and have sent me feedback about it.

I'm pleased to announce that we've added a new section featuring content from some of our partners that's relevant to Visual Basic developers.  We've started by highlighting InnerWorkings which provides training content that's available right in Visual Studio and provides detailed feedback on code that you write.  Over the next few months, we're going to highlight targeted content from additional partners including AppDev.

Do you have additional things that you'd like to see on VBRun?  Additional partners that you'd like to see highlighted?  Please let me know.

Are you going to be down at TechEd in Orlando in a couple of weeks?  Are you interested in meeting with the Visual Basic team while you’re down there?

Nine people from the VB team are going to be down at TechEd and we’re very interested in meeting with as many customers as possible while we’re down there.  We’re going to be hosting a couple of customer round tables (stay tuned to this location for more details on time and location). 

If you have questions about Visual Basic, want to give the team some feedback on Visual Basic 2005 or have ever wondered “why did they do it that way”, please drop me a line at jroxe@microsoft.com and we’ll see about setting up some time to get together.  We’d also love to see a demo of the applications that you’re building and get more information on what you consider to be most important.

Hope to see you there!

Author's Note:  Earlier today, I sent the attached note to each of the MVPs who signed the petition around VB6. Please let me know what you think.

I noticed that you signed the petition at http://classicvb.org/petition.  I'm mailing each of the MVPs who signed the petition directly in hopes of continuing this dialog and giving you some more insight into what’s going on with VB these days. 

There was a great deal of discussion around the issues raised in this petition back in 1999 and 2000 when Microsoft initially announced the design of Visual Basic .NET.  Some of the input that we received from the MVPs and the community changed this design significantly.   One debate was whether the Visual Basic language should evolve to target the .NET Framework.  Many of our VB customers felt they had reached the limits of what VB could do and were looking for more – better security, deeper access into the core Windows platform, easier leveraging of skills for building Web applications. After looking hard at the VB runtime, Microsoft made the decision that managed code based on the .NET Framework is the future strategic direction for development tools.

We took a lot of feedback when we made this decision and didn’t make it lightly. The MVPs have continued to give us a tremendous amount of feedback.  Much of the way that Visual Basic 2005 looks today is due to feedback that we got from MVPs about features like Edit and Continue, Design-time Expression Evaluation, and the overall simplification of the development environment.  The discussions on the MVP mailing list are sometimes heated, but this debate and feedback is what has led to the product that we are shipping later this year. 

We remain passionately committed to helping Visual Basic developers leverage their skills and solve new challenges using Visual Basic .NET and Visual Basic 2005.  Many MVPs have told us that migration is a difficult task for some types of code.  In response to that, we’ve concentrated on first helping developers to upgrade their skills.  Later this month, we’re introducing a “VB Upgrade Center” as a part of the developer center on MSDN.   We are also hosting a number of free training events worldwide and a pre-conference before TechEd focused on the Visual Basic 6 developer.  I welcome your input on how we can work together to continue to speak to Visual Basic developers.

There's also been a great deal of debate around the end of mainstream support.  To clarify, this is a switch from free to paid support.  Many of the questions around support have been thoroughly addressed in the blogs and the current information is available at http://msdn.microsoft.com/vbasic/support/vb6.aspx.  Soma also addressed this in his blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/somasegar and linked to other comments on this. However, I want to highlight to you that Microsoft is still supporting Visual Basic 6 and will continue to for quite some time.  In fact, the Visual Basic 6 runtime is slated to ship as a part of Windows Longhorn, which means that it will be covered under Longhorn’s support lifecycle.

There are strong feelings on all sides of the issue that sparked this petition and I know that this note is not going to address all of these concerns.  However, I hope that we can continue to have an open dialog around this issue.  Some of these discussions will continue in the public forum, but please also feel free to contact me directly.

Best,
Jay

We're running a survey (only takes about 3 minutes) to get some feedback on partially-trusted applications.  How many of you are building them?  What do you think?

Here's your chance to let us know: http://host.ultimatesurvey.com/microsoft/surveys/takesurvey.aspx?surveyid=1030

I recently did a chat with Graham Parker, George Gallagher, Richard Costall and Geoff Hirst with VBUG.NET in the UK.  It was a pretty interesting IM conversation and they were nice enough to post the transcript here.  We covered everything from the future of Visual Basic to upgrade paths from VB6.

Let me know what you think.

Happy Chinese New Year!  (well, a couple of days late).

As a part of my Chinese New Year resolutions, I'm going to write more in this blog, so look for an entry at least weekly. 

I spent last week down at VSLive and had a chance to catch up with a bunch of folks even if I wasn't speaking.  I actually had a small talk for the theatre prepared, but the plasma screen was busted.  One of the things that I was most looking forward to demoing was RegFree COM.  This is a technology that Stephanie Saad demonstrated in Soma's keynote at VSLive Orlando but hasn't gotten much discussion yet.  If you have COM components that you want to use with your VB 2005 applications (and we know you do), this provides a way to deploy the component to a user's machine along with a manifest.  This means that you don't need to register it on the user's machine, so you avoid the problems of "DLL Hell" and can actually have multiple versions running on the same machine.  If you select a COM component in a Visual Studio 2005 project, there's a new property "Isolated".  If you set this to true, the component can be deployed through ClickOnce and VS will automatically generate the manifest.  There's a few caveats including the fact that you have to be running on Windows XP or higher, can't do this to out-of-process server EXEs and can't be used as an add-in or snap-in.  

Speaking of conferences, how many of you have registered for TechEd yet?  We're going to have a pretty big VB presence from the team and will actually have a PreCon before the event.  The Precon's going to be focused on taking your skills from VB6 to VB2005, so all of you VB6 developers who don't know if you'd appreciate the .NET code at TechEd, this is your chance.  If you can spend the extra day down in Orlando before the show, you'll definitely have a head start.  Also, if you register for the show by April 15th and you can save 15% <-- not a bad deal if you're trying to sell it to your manager.

Hope all's well,

j-

Jackie Goldstein, the Regional Director from Israel, did a migration tour through Europe last year where he gave some great information on bringing VB6 applications forward to .NET.  It was a 10-stop, 1 day-per-stop seminar.  I've seen Jackie's content and it's good stuff - It's now available online at http://www.microsoft.com/israel/vbasic/vb2vbnet/english/default.mspx.  Check it out and let me know what you think.

jlr