The keynote today was really geat. Bill Gates and Chris Caposella showed off some great stuff in Windows Vista and in Office 12. One of the really cool things announced was LINQ (language integrated query). This is the thing we've been dying to tell you about. Visual Basic will have some awesome features that exploit this functionality to the fullest. Read more from Amanda Silver (VB program manager for the language) here, from Erik Meijer (I blogged about him last night) here, and of course, on MSDN here. Amanda's post has a good description of a bunch of new features we're planning for the future.

More to come...

I arrived in LA last night and had a great dinner with Jay Roxe, Alan Griver, and Erik Meijer. We talked a lot about VB futures, dynamic languages, and how Arnold Schwarzenegger rode a horse in an elevator at our hotel in some movie (well, yag kept talking about that :)).

Speaking of dynamic languages, Erik is giving a talk this week about dynamic languages. It's sure to be a great place to learn more about what makes a language dynamic. The talk is Thursday at 3:45. Erik has become a big fan of VB's ability to easily integrate both dynamic and static features into a single language. I'm looking forward to talking to him more about new ways to extend the langauge further into the dynamic realm.

As many of you have probably heard by now, there was a power outage today in LA. Yag and I were having lunch when it went out. It was kind of strange to see everything get dark. Luckily we had cash so we could pay our bill. We then hiked up 15 floors to yag's room to drop our bags off because we were headed to the convention center to register. It was a little unsettling to have the power go out and hear a lot of sirens rushing by outside. It only stayed for about 30 minutes.

I'll post more tomorrow after the show starts. There are lots of cool things planning for this week.

I attended an Orcas planning meeting this morning. Even though I took the day off today I didn't want to miss this meeting. Orcas is the next version of Visual Studio (after Whidbey) and we've been spending time working on the "pillars" of that product. We use pillars as a way to define the main goals or main focus areas for a product. It lets us better communicate to the teams and to also make sure that the work we're doing is in the right areas.

This time around we're adding something new. We're using what we're calling "scenarios" as a way to guide our development of the product. We've used scenarios for a very long time, but generally on a much smaller scale. These scenarios are all-encompassing descriptions of what the product will do from the moment someone starts to define a project all the way until they are servicing it. We are trying to come up with a small number of these end-to-end scenarios that will guide us through the product cycle. The Visual Studio Team System folks used this approach in Whidbey had great results.

The rest of my day will be spent talking to roofing speicalists and wondering how a roof could possibly cost as much as it does.

Thanks for joining me this week. Have a great weekend.

Sorry for the late post, but this is really the first chance I’ve had to post today.

I started today out doing something really fun. I attended the science fair at my son’s school. I was able to attend during the time that he presented this morning. His topic was viscosity. He did a great job doing his experiments and then presenting to his class. I was very proud of him.

I got back to work in time to have a short 1:1 with Steven Lees. He’s the group program manager for VB. My 1:1 meetings are always as mixture of many things – product issues, personnel issues, career discussions, and so forth. Steven and I talked about a couple of things. We didn’t have very much time because I was late. The main things were about nullable support in VB. There are some questions and issues being discussed and Steven gave me an update. Then we talked about a file ownership issue. It turns out that there are several PIAs (primary interop assemblies) that ship in VS whose ownership has become unclear. Sean Drain, a program manager on VB, has proposed that the VB team take on some of these files. I wanted to make sure we were able to do that without adding unnecessary risk to our ability to ship Whidbey on time. It sounded like we were OK.

Next I had a 1:1 with Alan Griver. Alan runs the VSData team. He’s been out of the office for several weeks on a personal trip to Europe followed by some business trips there as well. He and I talked about some of the great work that his team (specifically the FoxPro team) and the VB team have been doing on integrating data support much deeper into the VB language. This is really exciting work. Paul Vick has been heading this up and has been doing an excellent job. I think we’ll be showing some of this off at the PDC, so if you’re there you should definitely take a look. It will blow you away.

Next I had my staff meeting. This is where my senior folks get together once a week to discuss whatever is relevant. Today’s topics included VS7.1 SP1, which I blogged about previously. I wanted some information about work needed for this. We also talked about budget and closed on some open issues around the amount of money we’ll have next year to upgrade our test lab and for contract work. We then talked a little about Orcas and the planning efforts that are underway. As is always the case, when a new product is in the very early stages, everyone wants to be involved yet they know they have a ton of work on the current product: Whidbey in this case. It makes it tough.

I then had lunch with Keith Yedlin. He’s the Product Unit Manager for the .NET Client team (the folks that bring you Windows Forms). He’s been on a dev days trip to South Africa and just got back. We were catching up since he’s been out of the office for a couple weeks. Keith was very excited about his trip and during most of it he gave 3-4 hour demo sessions on Windows Forms. He is very excited about the great work they’ve done in Whidbey (so am I).

Then, back to more 1:1’s. I met with Adam Braden, who is the QA manager for VB. The QA teams are in crazy-mode right now. This is because as we get closer to shipping Whidbey, they are doing a bunch of test passes and other QA work to ensure our quality. They are the teams that are always the busiest toward the end of the product cycle. He and I talked about the PIA issue I mentioned above to make sure we were OK with taking on this extra work. We also discussed the holy grail of getting to 100% automation – where every single test is run by a machine. Our discussion was around how achievable and desirable this was. He believes this is a great goal to shoot for. Not because his team can take the summer off J, but because his team would have more time to do application building and other test work while we have great coverage in the labs. It equates to even better quality. It was a good discussion. Adam has been with the VB team for a very long time and is very passionate about quality and the customer experience.

My next meeting was with John Hamby, who is an architect on the VB team. John is working on future projects right now but in the past has been on the compiler team. John is pretty much responsible for the background compiler in VB, which I think is one of our coolest innovations. He and I talked about the direction of his current project and what the next steps are. He works very closely with Niklas, whom I blogged about earlier in the week. John was the one that started this project (related to distributed computing and concurrency). John is always looking out into the future to make sure we’re ready for what’s coming.

Next up I spent a couple hours with the folks from Artinsoft. They are the folks that created the migration wizard in VB. They have been doing some work on what they call the “companion” to the migration wizard. They’ve done some pretty impressive things. For those of you that have big projects and need more than the built-in tool can provide, you should check it out.

Finally, my last meeting was with Craig (my boss) and some folks on my team that are working on Avalon design time support. This work is for post-Whidbey. We sat down with Craig and reviewed the project, our schedule, resource needs, work done so far, and even gave him a cool demo. It was a good meeting. Craig had some good feedback on our target experiences and also our schedule. We have a similar meeting with Soma next week and this was good preparation. This is another area where we’re looking for some strong people to join the team. If you’re interested in working on a great team that is focused on providing design time and development experiences around Microsoft’s next-generation user interface, let me know.

I then headed back to my office to try to catch up on email. And, I did not adhere to my three-email-reading-times-a-day rule today. It was too crazy and I needed to check in a few time during lull times in meetings.

My son called me a couple times while I was reading email because he was trying to sign up for and download a new game called Maple Story. I don’t know much about it but I was doing my tech support job so he could get it to work.

That was Thursday. 

I mentioned previously that we're doing fiscal year planning. For me, this is always exciting because it's all about what *could* be. We get to think big thoughts, go out on a limb, and then put together real plans. It's a lot of fun.

It's always a challenge to get people to dedicate a big chunk of time for this type of planning. It's not that they don't want to do it. It's that there are so many other things going on: emails coming in, people calling, people knocking at the door, meetings (endless meetings), etc.

This year, I've decided that that we're going to take two days out of the office to focus on this. The first day will be a "dark" day - where everyone will have assigned areas to work on. I say "dark" because we'll be outside of the Microsoft campus where distractions should be at a minimum. People will be able to focus. The second day will then be a review of that work and pulling together a plan.

I'm looking forward to the focused time.

I've checked email three times this morning (even after my 8:30 email reading time). Boy, this whole idea about reading email at certain times is going to be hard for me to stick to. I can see the benefit. Yesterday was a good example. I did several things on my actions list instead of reading email. That felt really good. And, I was still caught up on email this morning.

It's hard to open the laptop and not just jump to email. Muscle memory, and the thought that something urgent is waiting for me, are causing these lapses.

I'll see how the afternoon goes.

Our review meeting with Soma went well. We covered a lot of things that we accomplished this last fiscal year and some things we didn't do so well at. Things that went well (that Soma agreed with :)) are:

1. Launching VBRun (way to go Jay Roxe!).
2. Getting some new VB case studies in the works. We some great ones coming out. Check the Microsoft case study site.
3. Continued increased usage of VB.NET
4. We've done a bunch of migration labs. These are week-long events where companies can come in and work in a lab with product team folks to learn about and make actual progress migration applications to VB.NET.

However, there were areas that we need to do better at (aren't there always). Some of these (and again, Soma agreed) are:

1. Interactions with our subsidiaries on VB awareness and programs. Microsoft is a big company with offices all over the world. Even though my team formed some good relationships with some of our subsidiaries to create new VB materials and programs, we didn't do a very good job maintaining those relationships and making progress with them. We'll do better next year.
2. We still feel we need to do a better job making sure our samples, whitepapers, and other content have great VB support. We're putting together plans to address this in a broader and more measurable way.

All-in-all, it was a good review.

I met with Niklas Gustafsson this afternoon. Niklas is an architect on my team that focuses on some future technologies we're working on. The main area of focus for him is creating new and innovative ways in the langauge and in the runtime to do distributed programming. This involves new concepts around concurrency, application and component distribution, message handling, etc. Think the VB model for Indigo. We are looking for a couple people to work on this effort. As soon as I can figure out how to find links to the job postings I'll post them here :).

-Rob