Shipping is one of the funnest (yep, it’s a word in my book) that I get to do at work. The sense of shared accomplishment is huge and enormously satisfying.
Shipping at midnight is even more fun. Something about the late hour and dark windows clarifies your focus and makes shipping even better. Of course, the caffeine, m&m’s, and lack of sleep help too.
Tonight, we're shipping a bunch o' new stuff in concert w/ the opening keynote at TechEd in Amsterdam (where it's daylight). I'll blog about more of our new stuff over the next few days, but for tonight, I’ll start off with the MSDN Product Feedback Center. In a nutshell, it’s our new public online bug and suggestion reporting system. It was born “ladybug”, because it helps to get rid of the bad bugs, and because I was tired of esoteric macho code names like Gladiator and Homer (I made one of those up.)
At the MSDN Product Feedback Center, you can submit bugs and suggestions. You can search through other people’s submitted bugs and suggestions. You can vote for your favorites. You can share workarounds. And, you can see feedback and details directly from folks on our product teams. Oh, and you can get notified when the status of an issue you’re interested in changes.
The big idea here is to help developers be more productive. I know that there’s nothing more frustrating than to bang your head on the wall chasing something that turns out to be someone else’s bug. So I wanted there to be a way to quickly and easily figure out if it's our bug or yours. Over time, I hope that more and more folks share workarounds, so when you come to report a bug or make a suggestion, you can also figure out how to work around it and get on with your work (or play). And I want Microsoft product teams to be more productive too. I want them to have a clear sense of which bugs and suggestions are most important to the most people, and I want them to minimize the time they have to spend wading through duplicate bugs.
I see this as our first step. There are still lots of features we’d like to implement, more products to add, and internal processes to refine. But I couldn’t be happier that we’ve taken the first step.
What’s next? You tell us…
-Sara
