Whidbey is over... What are you doing now?

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Recently I have been asked by many family and friends what I am doing at work now that we have shipped Whidbey. Some speculate that we are diving into Orcas, some think Orcas is complete and we are working on Hawaii, while others seem to think we are on a big break for the next few months.

While I can’t answer this question for everyone I can answer it for my self and most of the developer division (there may be some people going on vacation for a while, so I can’t speak for them). The developer division as a whole is working on MQ.

What is MQ?
MQ is a milestone that is post-Whidbey and pre-Orcas that will focus on quality.  We have learned a lot from the previous 3 versions of Visual Studio that were built around the .NET Framework, the biggest lesson that we learned on this most recent version was that we were not agile enough and we took too long to ship.

This milestone while it will not answer everything it gives the division time to analyze its processes and make improvements. Every team (just like a business) has areas that it would like to improve, but hasn’t been able to in the past when there is code churn and deadlines looming.

I really think that MQ is a great step in the right direction and I believe that as a customer you will see this throughout the Orcas product cycle.

MQ is cool… but what are YOU doing?
During MQ I will be working on various divisional and product unit proposals. As a rule of thumb all divisional proposals take precedence over all other work in MQ. This is because we feel that an approved divisional proposal will have a greater impact on the overall product then something specific to a product unit or feature crew.

The main task that I am trying to tackle for the C# Language Services (C# IDE) team is answering our code coverage story and being sure that our story properly aligns with the divisional story. I'll plan to write more about other projects that I am involved with and the experiences I encounter as time goes on.

If you have questions about MQ feel free to ask and I'll do my best to answer.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    November 04, 2005
    Some comments here:
    http://weblogs.asp.net/fmarguerie/archive/2005/11/05/429613.aspx

  • Anonymous
    November 04, 2005
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    November 05, 2005
    Have you guys considered the business rammifications of releasing a milestone between product releases? I've got customers who are "waiting for 2.0 until Service Pack 1", and you just validated their reasoning, even though 2.0 has been thoroughly tested.

    While I'm looking forward to what you guys come up with, I think this announcement may slow adoption quite a bit.

  • Anonymous
    November 05, 2005
    Interscape,
    They did the right thing. The ramifications of not addressing the quality issues would halt adoption not slow it.

  • Anonymous
    November 06, 2005
    Where did my comment go? Anyway, you'll find my thoughts here:
    http://weblogs.asp.net/fmarguerie/archive/2005/11/05/429613.aspx

    Robert, in this post, Eric does not say there will be an intermediate release. He just talks about a milestone on the development path to Orcas, I think.

  • Anonymous
    November 06, 2005
    Real or Spang?

  • Anonymous
    November 07, 2005
    Speculation is always interesting. I would not claim that I have announced anything or made mention to any kind of interim release. MQ is an internal milestone that will help us to focus on making modifications to our processes.

  • Anonymous
    November 10, 2005
    would MQ include any new items, or would it just be a maintenance release?

    also, do you have any insight into when MDI tabstrips will be offered as a .net control?

  • Anonymous
    December 01, 2005
    Eric,

    When you say "agile", do you mean agile methodologies or just the buzz word?

    What process is the team looking at? XP? SCRUM? What differences can we expect in terms of interarction with the C# team? Will the team adopt an approach that includes the on-site customer role from XP? Should we expect to see more input on the user story side? Will the team be adopting tactical agile development practices in effort to get out from under the beam of the way-too-early feature lock-in?

  • Anonymous
    March 23, 2006
    Will it have lazers?

  • Anonymous
    April 20, 2006
    I need some time to think about it, please ask me again later.

  • Anonymous
    July 17, 2007
    A couple of weeks ago, Grady Booch gave a lecture at Microsoft. It was a pleasure to hear of my software

  • Anonymous
    July 17, 2007
    A couple of weeks ago, Grady Booch gave a lecture at Microsoft. It was a pleasure to hear of my software

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