Thanks to all who commented on my question about distributing Whidbey builds on CDs or DVDs - I wanted to get back to you.  For the frequent updates, we're going to go with DVDs and downloads as the distribution media.  This provides a decent balance between serving everyone, convenience, and cost.  Again, I was asking in the context of providing frequent updates, i.e. not our less-frequent higher-quality, beta-style builds - I would expect the beta builds to be available via various media including CDs to ensure that media is not a blocker for customers.  There were also a number of suggestions re: putting cd images on the dvds as well to enable someone to burn their own if necessary - we're still following up on that.

Someone emailed me a question re: who to contact if their PDC Top10 DVD didn't show up: 

A number of people are asking whether PDC attendees will get new updates of Whidbey bits.  The simple answer is yes - when we make new versions of Whidbey available either in beta form or the interim builds that Ari Bixhorn was recently quoted on, we will make sure PDC attendees get the updates too (or have the option of getting them).  In the long run we want to make our beta processes more obvious and predictable, e.g. “Once you are in the program, you stay in the program until RTM” or something reasonable like that.  As I just posted in response to another blog, some of people's concern comes from the fact that the beta programs in the past have been neither transparent nor predictable.  We will fix that.  There is a small catch with the PDC that we are working through, in particular our commitment to not spamming attendees with all kinds of cool stuff.  (In my mind, since we handed out Whidbey bits there this wouldn't be spam - but then I assume all spammers have strong rationale why their spam is ok.  If anyone thinks it's not ok to send updates to attendees, I'd love to hear about it since right now this is a no-brainer for me.)  I'm sure we will work this out though and that PDC attendees will be included in the Whidbey beta program moving forward. 

This past week was a blur - lots and lots going on.  A few highlights:

I had lunch with Robert Scoble and had a great talk about the power of blogs in building community.  We're in the midst of planning more frequent drops of Whidbey bits, and two of the things we'll likely do are get the word out informally re: quality/problems/expectations via high visibility blogs people are already reading (e.g. Brad Abrams, Sara Williams, etc.), and provide some sort of Whidbey blog aggregator that provides a semi-official voice from the teams within DevDiv re: what problems people can expect, any workarounds, etc..  This does not mean that we'll turn these blogs into mktg spam, but just encourage these folks (who would probably do it anyway) to feel free to comment on the builds.

Also on the subject of more frequent build availability, we're looking at how to make it easier for people to report and track bugs.  For the near future, we'll continue to rely on bug reporting through betaplace, even though betaplace has a poor reputation within our division - it's too manual and customers often have a bad experience waiting for days or weeks for their registration to go through.  We've limited access to this tool largely due to the limitations and because the registration experience is so poor in an age where instant access is standard.  In the near future we'll push those limitations some and open it up more.  Further out (meaning months) we're going to have a much more open process that enables more collaboration re: bugs/feedback between our development teams and customers, and even between customers. 

There was a Jim Allchin review last week of the community efforts across his organization.  It's clear we have a lot of work to do, but we're making progress in some areas.  I almost caused permanent damage to my career by implying a ship date for Whidbey that was later than his expectation - I said we are looking hard at customer-reported bugs that have been postponed many months before we ship (the point being:  what kind of message does that send about whether we value the feedback?) and didn't explain “many months” very well.  After the mtg stopped and Jim said “what?  WHAT?” a couple times I figured out what he had heard and corrected the problem - I was referring to some bugs people reported last July that got postponed.  I'm still here, but I assume I'm on double-secret probation now :-)

Speaking of Jim, this is my second stint at MS.  In my first stint here I got to work on Windows1 as a developer.  I remember a time when I linked my Windows application directly into Windows and it all ran in 64K of memory.  (Hopefully some Monty Python fans are thinking “You were lucky!  My family grew up in a shoebox.”)  At some point in the OS/2 days, I switched over to program management, and ultimately was the group program manager when we shipped NT3.1.  I worked briefly in the Cairo team, and left pretty soon after that.  After 7 years of doing some interesting, non-software-related things, I came back in early 2001 to work with Mark Lucovsky on HailStorm.  (There's a story).  I moved into Visual Studio about 18 months ago, ran the program management team in the smart devices team (VS for PPC / CE-based devices), and moved over into this job a couple weeks ago.  It's a very big company compared to when I started, and one of the things that attracted me to this job is the the big disconnect between public perception of MS and the fact that people who work here do care about our customers succeeding.  People have always cared, but in growing big we lost some of the connection we had with developers.  We want to strengthen the connection and enable our customers to be more successful. 

A week ago I took a new job running the team that is driving the Developer Division's community efforts for Visual Studio and the .NET Framework.  (I planned to write this in my first day in the job, but promptly got pretty sick and just returned to the land of the living). 

Jeremy Bostrom (in our team) recently asked some questions about what people are looking for (here: http://weblogs.asp.net/jerbos).  I thought I'd explain a bit about how we're viewing our community work.  I'd love feedback, as I'm just getting up to speed and would love to be informed by the opinions of people outside the company.  Also, if you have suggestions on what to study, read, view, etc., fire away.

The MS community efforts fall in 4 main areas:

1) MS Participation: MS has grown big enough (or just big) that it's been easy for many people to do their work without ever having a personal interaction with a customer.  There has been a very strong focus in our division in recent months on ensuring that every person has some contact with customers every month - newsgroups, going to conferences, helping respond to customer bugs/qfe's, etc..  Hopefully you've noticed an increased presence in newsgroups, etc..  We still have a lot of work to do here.  The bet is that people who have had first-hand experience with customer questions/confusion/pain will do a better job prioritizing what matters and building products that really work for people. 

2) Engaging key people outside of MS:  We recognize that we can't do this alone, and view the many key people outside (e.g. Microsoft MVPs) as an essential part of building a strong community.  We are more conscious about involving this group early on in the development process.  Again, we can do a lot better still.  I'm actually curious on one thing here - does our work with key people (e.g. inviting them to a design preview) support the general sense of community, or does it give “non-key“ people the sense that we somehow care less about them?  That's absolutely not the intent. 

3) Responding to feedback:  We want to make sure that when people have ideas or report bugs, we close the loop and make sure there are clear responses.  I interpret this one fairly broadly - there are a lot of things we can do be more transparent and have our relationship with customers be more two-way, including better tracking/closure on bugs, more frequent access to builds, doing a better job of ensuring that customer-reported bugs get fixed not postponed, etc..  While we've made some progress here, look for us to do much better in coming months.  There are a lot of people outside the company who invest in helping us ship products and we want to ensure a) we (including our customers) are getting the full benefit and b) that these folks feel like their investment is valued here. 

4) Product integration:  We want to make sure the community resources are readily available to people using our products and that the line between what we ship and what is available in the community blurs some.  For example, if someone needs a sample on how to do something, they'd probably like to see both the samples we shipped in the box and whatever the community has developed.  We're just at the beginning on this one. 

As I say, we have a lot of work to do.  I'm excited about being part of it.  If you have thoughts, ideas, gripes, please let us know.  In future posts I'll tell you a little more about me and more about the kinds of things we are considering.