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Visual Studio Express is Free
Up until today, all of the Express products (VB Express, VC# Express, VC++ Express, VJ# Express, and VWD) were not free -- I believe they had a value of $49 associated with them. We were doing a...
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Scenario-Based Planning
As you may or may not know, for Visual Studio "Orcas" planning we’re using a new process based on the concepts of scenarios, value propositions, experiences, and tasks. This system relies on the idea...
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The Orcas Software Enthusiast Scenario Personas
The scenario I’m working on is for the “software enthusiast” – think of this person as the person who isn’t a professional programmer but really enjoys coding for recreation. To make this scenario hold...
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Software Enthusiast Scenario Fake Demo Script
As a way to get my head around the whole scenario, I wrote up the entire scenario as a kind of very high-level demo script and tied each action back to an experience in a value proposition. How much of...
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Principles for First-Use Tools
Even as we’re working out the potential features for the next version of Visual Studio Express, we’re looking beyond that. Express has done an amazing job (5M downloads!) of getting development tools...
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Who's the Customer?
Who is the target user for our non-professional tools? In order to make smarter decisions about what we build, we need to understand that the customer we’re building this product for doesn’t fit a...
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How Did You Learn to Program?
How did you learn to program? Especially if you’re not a professional developer and never had been (I already have the data that says that something like 70% of professional developers got degrees in...
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Express "Orcas" Principles
Building on my Principles for First-Use Tools, I'm thinking about Principles for Express. Express is a tougher job because its customer base spans so many people -- from professionals coding after...
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Multitargeting and Express
When Visual Studio "Orcas" ships, we have a question we need to answer: which version(s) of the .NET Framework/WinFX should it target? Having a single tool that can target various runtimes has been...
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An Express Web Page Editor?
Do we need a complement to Visual Web Developer Express (i.e. a free, simplified Web page editor) that is aimed at the HTML jockey? If so, what features should it have? The big question for me on this...
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After HTML and Javascript, C++
Surprising factoid: after HTML and Javascript, C++ is the language most used by non-professional developers (including students, hobbyists, etc.). This based on some of our internal research over the...
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We Have a Name: NPT
We still need a name for the team. Since none of the ideas we came up with previously seemed to pass the internal sniff test (go figure), I decided that I’d opt for naming it descriptively: the...
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Adam Nathan Joins Non-Pro Tools Team
We have our first developer. Adam Nathan has joined us. If that name sounds familiar, it’s because he’s the soul behind Pinvoke.net, a community site dedicated to getting good coverage of .NET’s...
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What We’re Doing: Cool Tools
While I’ve been running around creating PPTs and sending email, Adam has been working on a prototype development experience that’s designed to take someone with no knowledge of code through to creating...
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Non-Pro Tools Team PUM
We have a PUM. Paramesh Vaidyanathan who ran the India Developer Center for Developer Division – a team of something like 100 people – has decided he wants to come back to the US to run the...
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NPT Team Charter
After about four months of working through some hard problems, I’ve begun to center our team on a few core work areas. Based a lot on the feedback you gave me through this blog, I narrowed it to three...
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Job Descriptions
I’ve found that writing job descriptions is harder than I thought. In particular, it’s harder because I’m writing for so many audiences: for the internal developers and PMs who might be interested, the...
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US Imagine Cup: Not Just Algorithms
One of the largest challenges facing CS students is the transition from being a CS student to writing production code in a work environment for a living. Historically programming challenges have...
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RTB Finished
One of the meetings that our division inflicts regularly schedules is called "running the business" (formerly they were called "rhythm of the business" but I think someone noticed that we don't got...
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