Ken Levy's Blog : VSX

VSX Community Letter for April 2008 posted on VSX Team blog

klevy — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 01:57:29 GMT

Just posted the VSX Community Letter for April 2008.

VSX Community Letter for March 2008 posted on VSX Team blog

klevy — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 00:30:00 GMT

Just posted the VSX Community Letter for March 2008.

VSX Community Letter for February 2008 posted on VSX Team blog

klevy — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 05:55:00 GMT

Reminder about the VSX Community Letter for February 2008.

VSX Community Letter for January 2008 posted on VSX Team blog

klevy — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 08:25:00 GMT

Just posted the VSX Community Letter for January 2008.

VSX Community Letter for October 2007 posted on VSX Team blog

klevy — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 11:20:00 GMT

Just posted the VSX Community Letter for October 2007.

VSX Community Letter for September 2007 posted on VSX Team blog

klevy — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 22:27:00 GMT

Just posted the VSX Community Letter for September 2007.

VSX Community Letter for August 2007 posted on VSX Team blog

klevy — Fri, 10 Aug 2007 20:23:00 GMT

Just posted the VSX Community Letter for August 2007.

VSX Community Letter for July 2007 posted on VSX Team blog

klevy — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 20:30:00 GMT

Yesterday I posted the VSX Community Letter for July 2007 on the VSX Team blog. This is the first in a series of ongoing monthly letters to the Visual Studio Extensibility (VSX) community. The letter is also highlighted on the http://msdn.com/vsx/ developer center. The general theme of each community letter is a summary of information from the past month including: 1) what the VS Tools Ecosystem team has been working on 2) recent news, announcements, and content 3) useful community and events information. The letter concludes with a what we are working on now and a sneak preview of what to expect next month's letter.

VSX Team Blog and VSX Developer Center

klevy — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 10:31:00 GMT

An update on a few things I'm working on relative to the new VSX community building including a team blog and the msdn.com site for VS extensibility. I created the new VSX Team Blog recently and kicked off the steady blog activity (the 5 entries this week all listed below) while here at TechEd 2007, some including short video interviews.

VSX is a short name and acronym I coined for Visual Studio eXtensibility. While I post all the blog entries on the VSX team blog, I do so in third person context as a kind of voice of the team for community. I'll differentiate from what I post on the VSX team blog and what I post here on my blog as follows. The VSX team blog will include mostly formal news and announcements from the VSX team, while here on my blog I'll post additional details about VSX team and community as well as topics beyond VSX.

I also now directly edit all of the content on the VSX developer center at http://msdn.com/vsx, which was updated (home page only) last week. Next week I'll be working in updating the VSX dev center site completely to take on a new template UI. Check out the http://msdn.com/vcsharp or the http://msdn.com/vbasic dev centers to see what the new UI looks like for tools and language sites on msdn.com. The new UI and additional updates for the VSX dev center is scheduled to be completed near the end of this month.

New VSX Team blog, the search for Dr. Ex, going to MIX07

klevy — Sat, 28 Apr 2007 14:50:00 GMT

There’s a new VSX Team Blog created as part of my community activities on the VS Tools Ecosystem team. Some news and fun kick of a few of the first blog posts there.

You'll see in one of the first posts on the new VSX team blog some comments and a fun short video about my new quest to interview the VSX team member known as Dr. Ex. He is an Visual Studio extensibility expert and also known as the mad doctor who will attempt to address technical issues on the VS SDK on his blog.

I'll be at MIX07 from April 29th to May 2nd, blogging from Las Vegas on my blog here as well as on the new VSX team blog. Those who are not attending MIX07 can learn about the news, fun, live keynotes, sessions, and partner demos coming out of the show at the http://visitmix.com web site. You can also subscribe to the various news and multimedia that will be posted during the 72-hour conversation at http://visitmix.com/feeds/rss/.

From product planner to program manager

klevy — Sat, 14 Apr 2007 03:51:00 GMT

This week I took on a newly created position at Microsoft, as community program manager on the Visual Studio Ecosystem team focusing on developer community for VSX (Visual Studio Extensibility). The VSX community includes developers who build add-ins (tools, editors, designers, languages, and more) for Visual Studio using the VS SDK found at the VSX developer center at http://msdn.com/vsx.

It was not an easy decision for me to leave the Windows Live Platform division where there are many great people I worked with and many cool things going on there. Many of those cool new things from the Windows Live Platform group will be announced at the MIX07 event in a few weeks. Most of the what I was working on in Windows Live around product planning over the last 6+ months has been under non-disclosure, and I haven't been blogging in a while. In the next few weeks, I will be doing some activities for Channel 9 content and http://dev.live.com/ blogging leading up to and during the MIX07 conference. In my transition back to the developer division, I'll be bringing knowledge and enthusiasm about Windows Live to the Visual Studio division which may contribute in various future efforts for Visual Studio based SDKs and add-ins for developers who are using Windows Live Platform services.

For those who don't know my past, here is my bio:

Ken Levy is the community program manager on the Visual Studio Ecosystem team focusing on developer community for VSX (Visual Studio Extensibility). The VSX community includes developers who build add-ins (tools, editors, designers, languages, and more) for Visual Studio using the VS SDK found at the VSX developer center http://msdn.com/vsx. Ken was previously a product planner on Microsoft's Windows Live Platform team working on developer community and future product planning. Before working in the Windows Live division, Ken was a product manager in the VS Data team responsible Visual FoxPro product management, the VFP developer web site, as well as sponsorship of the new XML tools in Visual Studio 2005 created by the WebData XML team. Ken is a long time recognized member of the FoxPro community and has developed many high profile applications and tools in all versions of FoxBase/FoxPro since 1986. Ken spent over four years as a software engineer consulting for Microsoft on the Visual FoxPro team from version 3.0 through 7.0 and is the author of many components of Visual FoxPro including the Class Browser and Component Gallery. While working as a consultant at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in the 1990s, Ken developed many public domain open source programs including GenScrnX and other developer tools used worldwide in creating in-house and commercial applications. Ken is a former technical contributing writer and editor to many software magazines, and has been a frequent speaker at industry conferences world wide since 1992. Ken's blog is at http://blogs.msdn.com/klevy.

Some additional information about my career background is contained in a detailed blog post I made last year: Enduring adventures to Antarctica and Microsoft.

In the spirit of transparency, below is the exact job description of the newly created position I just started on yesterday which should give some insight the various new VSX community efforts that I will be focused on:

Visual Studio is the world’s leading development environment, and our large partner ecosystem helped us attain that position. Hundreds of companies extend Visual Studio with features such as new development languages, application lifecycle tools, IDE enhancements, reusable components and much more. These partner offerings help to fill the gaps in the Microsoft product line and deliver tailored end-to-end solutions to customers that we wouldn’t reach otherwise. The Visual Studio Ecosystem team is chartered with growing and strengthening this developer tools ecosystem. We ship the Visual Studio SDK, help ISVs integrate their products with Microsoft tools, and engage with the enthusiast community extending Visual Studio. We received the Developer Division’s Lighthouse award for team innovation and execution excellence in using agile development methodology, shipping frequent SDK releases, and engaging our partners for mutual success.

We are looking for a strong program manager to lead our initiatives growing the number of enthusiast developers creating Visual Studio extensions. You will work with our product and marketing teams to build a developer community from the ground up. You will coordinate and execute an overall strategy encompassing community infrastructure, team engagement, content, and product features. You yourself may also become a major presence and central figure in the community through blogs, forums, and conferences. This position leads a key pillar of our ecosystem strategy, and will receive a lot of visibility both internally and externally to Microsoft.

The ideal candidate will have prior success in growing some type of community (preferably developer-related) and the ability to manage many concurrent projects. This position offers a unique opportunity to exercise your leadership, project management, and strategic planning skills. Responsibilities include but are not limited to:
· Own the plan to establish a new, self-sustaining developer community
· Drive the product team’s community engagement
· Personally maintain a major presence in the community
· Speak at conferences and other community events
· Establish the online community infrastructure
· Launch a new MVP discipline
· Coordinate special development projects
· Find new ways to grow and enrich the community

I'm on James Lau's team, his blog is at http://blogs.msdn.com/jameslau/. I'll be blogging here weekly and working on other types of online content starting next week. I'm part of a team working on making overall enhancements to the VSX developer center at http://msdn.com/vsx. Starting in May, I plan to post a monthly letter there to the VSX community with information about what's new with the VS SDK, community news, upcoming events, and what's coming soon from the VS Ecosystem team. If you are a VSX developer (developer who has used the VS SDK), feel free to contact me and let me know your ideas and suggestions around improving the VS SDK and helping build an enthusiastic, passionate, and successful developer community around Visual Studio extensibility.