Tom Archer's Blog : MSDN

New Windows Vista and WinFX Sites Launched

tomarcher — Tue, 23 May 2006 21:33:00 GMT

In addition to the launch of the first public Windows Vista Beta since last year's PDC, we have also published a complete redesign of the MSDN Windows Vista and WinFX developer centers in order to create a seamless, unified experience for users moving from one site to another. The sites also reflect the look and feel of the Windows Vista UI, and the Windows Vista site on www.microsoft.com.

There were many goals associated with this project, including

Ensuring that key technical information is more discoverable with redesigned site navigation
Coordination with other site teams to launch a set of sites that are visually connected, similar in messaging, but audience-appropriate
Creating a seamless, unified experience for users moving from one site to another – whether that be from Vista to WinFX or among the various audience-specific Vista sites (MSDN, TechNet and Microsoft.com)
Supporting a newer, cleaner "look and feel"

While the look and feel you see today is a huge step in the right direction – especially in terms of helping developers find the information they need more quickly – we're definitely not finished. Over the next couple of weeks, stay tuned for the following additions/modifications to the Vista and WinFX Developer Centers.

Learning - The Learning section will be updated to better offer guidance and help to people new to Windows Vista development. This includes overview pages of various technologies with links to articles and hands-on labs for further discovery as well as links to training as that becomes available from the Microsoft Learning Product Group.
Community - As many have seen with our "CodeZone" initiative, we as a company are focusing more and more on the aggregation of various information sources to enable developers to find the help they need. In addition, product teams are more committed than ever to answering your questions on the various MSDN Forums. To that end, we're almost complete with a new Community page that will enable developers to locate all of these resources from a single page.
Support - Another page we've redesigned that is close to publication is the Support page that enable developers to quickly find the level of support they need from a single page

At the end of the day, our job performance is measured by whether or not we've been able to provide to you, the developer, the information you need in an easily accessible manner. Therefore, as always please feel free to email me regarding any improvements that you would like to see regarding your experience with the Windows Vista and WinFX Developer Centers.

Why MSDN publishes more Managed Code than Native Code Information

tomarcher — Sun, 26 Mar 2006 08:15:00 GMT

From time to time, I get queries like “Why is Microsoft forcing managed code on us?” or “Why is Microsoft abandoning native code?” and so on. As MSDN is a key Microsoft public interface to developers, I thought I’d answer that from my own perspective.

Being a Program Manager at MSDN offers me a unique position within Microsoft as my specific job (Content Strategist) is to publish content that balances the needs of marketing and the technical product teams with our own knowledge of the target audience and the technologies involved while aligning with Microsoft’s overall business goals. Needless to say, the job can be quite challenging and at times more political than I’d prefer as I’ve been a programmer since the early 80’s and sometimes long for the days of being lost in low-level code as opposed to endless meetings. However, at the same time, I do enjoy my job very much as it enables me to see the business from many different vantage points and to have a basic understanding of why we do some of the things we do. One of those issues is the whole “managed code vs. native code” issue regarding why we promote the former much more than the latter.

To start with, I submit to you that there is no black and white here. We’re talking about the amount of information on managed code and managed code tools relative to native code information. In terms of native code, there are over 7,000 new APIs in the Windows SDK and every two weeks, we publish a new chapter to the Windows Vista Developer Story – a 600+ page collection of information on native SDK development. In addition, as we get closer to releasing the Windows Vista and the new Windows SDK, you’ll begin to see even more native code articles. However, most of the native code information is centralized on the Windows Vista and Visual C++ Developer Centers with the majority of information being published by MSDN being focused on managed code. Hopefully, this post will explain why – at least from my point of view.

Marketing –At Microsoft we have hundreds of products, but it’s no surprise that the reason we remain the most profitable software company in the world is by virtue of selling two main products - Windows and Office. In addition, it’s critical for the long-term stability of Microsoft that we also have a major impact on the Web.

Everything else (especially development tools) is simply a means of accomplishing those goals. An example is the Windows SDK. It’s completely free to anyone that wants to download it as it serves the greater purpose of getting developers to write Windows applications, which in turn sells more copies of Windows. In addition, you frequently see us hold training seminars that, at best, break even and might even lose money. Once again, the goal isn’t making money from these products or functions. The goal is to get information into the hands of developers so that they write Windows applications – or Web applications using Microsoft technologies.

There are many more examples – such as the free Visual Studio Express products, free training, free technical articles on MSDN and so on, but you get the point. The focus is always things like, “What can we do to the O/S to enable developers to create the apps they want for their customers?”, “How can we make the development tools easier to use to lower the cost of delivering that software in a timely fashion?”, etc.

Having said that, the latest technologies that accomplish the goals of selling Windows, pushing the Web and making it easier for developers to write Windows applications, are things like Windows Presentation Foundation, Windows Communication Foundation, Windows Workflow, etc.

Therefore, most conversations between marketing and MSDN deal with focusing on these newer technologies – in the form of publishing technical articles and whitepapers written by evangelists, promoting training and seminars, providing demos and hands-on labs and so on.

Product Teams – This is an easy one as most likely if you’re reading my blog, you’re also a developer and realize that most developers want to work on the latest, coolest thing. Our dev teams are no different. Therefore, internally when our product team developers write for MSDN they’re generally writing about the latest technologies. In addition, the various levels of management for these product teams also focus on requesting that we more heavily promote the latest innovations and features of their products.

Target Audience – If you ever want the definitive answer for why we at Microsoft do something, follow the metrics. The Visual Studio and .NET Developer Centers are – by far - the two most popular Dev Centers (in terms of traffic and users). They are followed up by Windows Vista (which is gaining rapidly despite still being in beta) and VB.NET. The meaning is clear. Developers come to MSDN looking for information about managed code and Windows Vista.

Therefore, one way of answering the question of why we post so much managed code content (relative to native code) is via the old adage, "We don't make the news; we only report it." Like any other company we stay in business by meeting the needs of our customers. If customers weren't asking for and responding favorably to this, we’d be going in a different direction. Therefore, it’s simply inaccurate to say that we’re forcing anything on anyone. We’re the ones reacting to what the masses have requested and right now that’s managed code and tools for developing advanced UIs in the fasted time possible.

Why so many examples in Visual Basic?

tomarcher — Mon, 21 Nov 2005 19:59:00 GMT

I've received a few queries lately as to why MSDN - and Microsoft as a whole - has become more focused on producing Visual Basic.NET examples and code snippets in our articles and presentations. The reason is two-fold.

First, while I can't publicly state the actual numbers, I can tell you that there are many times more Visual Basic developers than C++ and C# developers. Therefore, basic business sense would indicate that - since it's not economically efficient to produce examples in all languages - we produce examples in the language used by the majority of developers using our platforms.

Second, we've spent a good deal of time and money evaluating how each group of programmers reacts to articles and presentations when the code is in the another language. These statistics show that the majority of C++ and C# developers are more apt to read an article that contains Visual Basic.NET material than the reverse. In other words, a very high percentage of Visual Basic developers will not read an article if it contains C++ or C#.

I'll leave trying to surmise why this is true to the reader. However, my personal opinion is that C++ and C# developers are much more accustomed to class libraries than Visual Basic developers. As a result, they can more easily look past the exact language semantics of a .NET example written in Visual Basic and focus instead on the .NET types/classes being used. Visual Basic developers - on the other hand - coming from a less object-oriented background of Visual Basic 6, already have the learning curve of trying to learn a new way of developing software without the added overhead of also having to convert the language syntax.

Whatever the reasons for this phenomenon, our research has shown that producing examples for presentations and articles in Visual Basic enables the broadest reach to all of our developers.