WPF Community Feedback

Microsoft exposes a variety of community resources for you to learn about, discuss, and provide feedback on Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), including blogs produced by WPF team members and community leaders, forums, and the Microsoft Product Feedback Center. Each community resource offers a different set of benefits. These benefits are described here, as are a set of best practices for using each to ensure the best response from the community at large and Microsoft in particular.

This topic contains the following sections.

• Blogs
• Forums
• Product Feedback Center
• Windows Presentation Foundation Community Site
• MSDN Community Content

Blogs

Microsoft WPF team members and community leaders author a variety of blogs that target WPF in general or subsets of WPF specifically. Content generally ranges from product developments, motivations, and philosophies, to detailed discussion of specific scenarios, issues, and API. Additionally, you can discuss or inquire further about posts that interest you with people who have the deepest understanding of the platform.

Forums

The WPF forum (and the forum for Windows Vista 64) is the primary community resource for discussing and resolving issues. Forums facilitate discussion and problem resolution by offering a comprehensive set of supporting features that include:

• Searching.

• Discussion tracking.

• Rich formatting for text and code.

• Microsoft Visual Studio integration.

• Most Valued Professional (MVP) and community involvement.

• Monitoring to ensure posts are responded to in the quickest possible time.

Note that while an issue may be WPF-related, the WPF forum might not be the most appropriate place to raise it. For example, your issue might be specific to a WPF tool such as Expression Blend, Expression Web, and Expression Design. In these cases, you should use the appropriate Expression Community forums.

Forum Best Practices

Using the following best practices help to address issues posted to the WPF forum in the quickest possible time. These practices are applicable to all forums.

Search Existing Posts

Some issues occur widely enough that others have faced them before you. Consequently, you can solve your problem quickly, or you can add your input to an existing discussion.

Use Meaningful Titles

Concise, meaningful titles improve the discoverability of your posts, and make it easier for other WPF forum community members to determine if they can solve your problem.

Include Appropriate Content

You should describe the issue and how you’ve tried to work through it. If possible, include supporting code snippets, or the simplest possible sample that demonstrates your issue. All these details help to increase the chance your question will be answered quickly.

A complete set of forum best practices can be found online.

Product Feedback Center

Issues can sometimes be difficult to resolve, or irresolvable. Such situations arise because of bugs in the technology, difficulties applying the technology to particular scenarios, or lack of support for particular scenarios. This information is important to Microsoft, and can be provided via the Product Feedback Center.

Items posted on the WPF Product Feedback Center are routed to the WPF team's internal bug database. Consequently, it is the most reliable way to get your feedback to the WPF feature owner. In addition, you can validate and track suggestions and bugs as well as vote on them, which helps the WPF team to prioritize issues.

WPF Product Feedback Center Best Practices

When posting to the WPF Product Feedback Center, searching existing posts, providing a meaningful title and appropriate content are important best practices, just as they are for posting to the WPF forum. The following are additional best practices you should also employ.

Search Existing Posts

Some issues occur widely enough that others have faced them before you. Consequently, you can solve your problem quickly, or you can add your input to an existing discussion.

Use Meaningful Titles

Concise, meaningful titles increase the chance that your issue is directed to the most appropriate WPF team in the shortest amount of time. This is particularly important for a technology like WPF, which contains many interrelated features.

Describe How to Reproduce Your Bug

When you post about a bug, it is important to include the following where relevant:

• Provide a clear description of the bug.

• Use code snippets to support the bug description.

• Provide a list of steps that demonstrate how to reproduce the bug.

• Include the smallest possible code sample that reproduces the bug.

• Mention whether the bug is consistently reproducible or not.

• Include relevant exception information.

If the bug is install or setup related, attach the relevant install logs and snapshots (files prefixed with "dd_" that are located in your %temp% folder).

For compile or build issues, attach the build logs. The MSBuild system can be configured to supports logging with various verbosities by using the /v: switch from the command line or by configuring the appropriate level from an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) like Microsoft Visual Studio.

Provide Environment Information

Background information can often be useful for adding context to your post. In particular, mention the operating system platform, processor family, and architecture, such as "Windows XP SP2, Pentium III, x86".

If the issue you are posting about is related to rendering, you should also include graphics card and driver details, if possible. This information is important because WPF is a presentation framework.

Provide Solution or Project Information

Bugs may pertain to the tools used to develop and build your applications and the types of applications you are building. Consequently, it can be useful to specify:

• The type of application you are building, such as:

  • Application (.exe) or library (.dll).

  • Extensible Application Markup Language (XAML) browser application (XBAP).

  • Loose XAML application.

  • Standalone installed applications.

  • Standalone ClickOnce-deployed applications.

• The development tool, such as:

  • MSBuild.

  • Expression Graphic Designer.

  • Expression Interactive Designer.

  • Microsoft Visual Studio.

• The solution configuration, such as:

  • A solution.

  • A single project.

  • A solution with multiple dependent projects.

• Whether your application has language-specific or language-neutral resources. For example, did you specify the UICulture project property or localizable metadata for Application, Page, and Resource types?

• Whether you used the neutral language setting in the AssemblyInfo.cs or AssemblyInfo.vb file.

Provide Scenario and Impact Information

Information about the scenario that manifests the bug and its impact is highly important to the WPF team when it decides if, when, and how a problem should be fixed, or whether an acceptable workaround can be used instead.

Ordinarily, crash and data loss scenarios are high impact and, therefore, the easiest to prioritize. Some bugs, however, only show up in uncommon scenarios, which may also be mainline scenarios in some cases. Providing context around scenario and impact helps the WPF team make the right decision.

Windows Presentation Foundation Community Site

WPF is supported by Microsoft with a community portal site that provides a single point of entry to WPF-related blogs, forums, and other resources.

MSDN Community Content

The Windows Presentation Foundation documentation provides a complete set of technical content that targets the core scenarios that are enabled by WPF. Of course, developers in the real world encounter a wide variety of interesting and not-so-common scenarios and consequently learn things that could be of benefit to the WPF development community at large.

To enable developers to share their knowledge and experience with the WPF community, the documentation has been augmented with MSDN Community Content, which allows developers to add and update comments on each conceptual, reference, how-to, tutorial, and sample topics.

The benefit of adding information to MSDN Community Content is to provide a central, current, and shared repository of Microsoft and community knowledge and experience that extends the benefits of the online documentation. Furthermore, the content is moderated to ensure clear, correct, appropriate, and useful information is provided.

What Type of Content should be added to MSDN Community Content?

MSDN Community Content is designed to capture relevant, useful, and appropriate information that extends the existing MSDN content. Bugs, feedback, threaded discussions, and questions should be posted using the appropriate, and more effective, tools, described earlier.

MSDN Community Content Moderation

The MSDN Community Content is moderated to ensure that the content is appropriate. As described by the MSDN Content Moderation Guidelines, the following types of content are considered inappropriate:

• Content that violates the MSDN Community Code of Conduct

• Irrelevant, incomprehensible, and test content

• Duplicate content

• Spam

• Documentation feedback

• Bug reports

• Questions

Moderators will process these types of content according to the MSDN Community Content Moderation Guidelines.

MSDN Community Content Language Support

MSDN Community Content is available on both the US English and Brazilian Portuguese versions of MSDN Online. Future releases are being considered for Japanese, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Korean, and both Simplified and Traditional Chinese.

MSDN Community Content Frequently Asked Questions

Further information can be found in the MSDN Community Content FAQ.