Now that we've shipped V1, what's going on?

Now that we've shipped. I wanted to provide transperency into what we're doing in the group.

The top three initiatives are:

Introspection

This is what I call the introspective phase of the software lifecycle (MQ), where we're analyzing the mistakes we made in the last ship cycle and are trying to improve our processes, strategy, and plans so that we don't make them again in Orcas. We're rethinking how we ship software so that we can ship high quality software faster, and we're actively thinking about what "Internet Software Services" means to our product; it's essential that we make tools that align with this vision.

SP for Visual Studio 2005

Soma has stated that there will be a service pack (SP) for Visual Studio 2005 around summer next year. As a result, we will be actively looking at all the customer issues that are being found to see what we can do to make our customers successful in their endevours. It is, therefore, essential that if you have an issue with the DSD designers, that you report a bug through the MSDN Product Feedback Center.

The following are examples of bugs that we will be looking at:

- [https://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/productfeedback/viewfeedback.aspx?feedbackid=08da6e38-56ce-4a2f-867d-f2dc49d5b903](https://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/productfeedback/viewfeedback.aspx?feedbackid=0)

https://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/productfeedback/viewfeedback.aspx?feedbackid=1b6183d7-6f70-4f77-a0ff-83368a95212b

Orcas and beyond...

As a new product, we need to put a lot of effort into planning for Orcas and beyond. While the top two initiatives are a priority, we've also broken up into small teams that are actively looking at the product with different perspectives. I've been tapped the owner for the Architect scenario team and I am focusing on three key value propositions: increasing value of design artifacts, improving collaboration between architects and other personas in the development lifecycle, and tooling to support the architectural design process. There are other teams who are responsible for looking at guidance, WCF/WF, partner, model analysis, etc. scenarios.

As Orcas is a short release, we're going to be constrained for what we can accomplish. Therefore, as a priority, we will be eventually aligning our features with the divisions scenarios and augmenting those features with a few essential high customer value features.

Ali