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Whidbey, Gadgets and VS Ecosystem

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It's been a long time since I have touched this blog. I promise I will do a better job at keeping my blog alive moving forward.

So since the last time I posted here (which has almost been 2 years), I have been focusing on helping the IDE team ship as part of Visual Studio 2005. Of course, we shipped in November 2005. Both the new VSTS SKUs and the new freely downloadable Express SKUs were huge hits. Shortly after that, our entire division invested in a milestone called MQ, where we focused on engineering investements. We did things like code bloat reduction, architectural layering, and test infrastructure improvements. After MQ was completed, and reflected on my past 3 years working on the IDE team. Through that time, I made a lot of friends, learned a lot and had a blast. But I decided to try something new, so I joined the Live.com team in Windows Live and became the PM who drove the gadgets developer story. I shipped the first Windows Live Gadgets SDK while I was there, and I found the technology to be refreshing. But soon, I started to miss the people at DevDiv (Developer Division). Although I owned the gadgets developer story, there was something different about being surrounded by DevDiv people who has strong technical acumen and keen focus on developers. I decided to return to DevDiv, and I joined the VS Ecosystem team.

The VS Ecosystem team has a challenging mission:

  1. Make VS extensibility easier - we want to lower the bar for developers to build and integrate components inside Visual Studio.
  2. Support VSIP partners and businesses - there are hundreds of partners who build their businesses by developing software that integrate with Visual Studio. We need to do our best in supporting their business and technical needs.
  3. Build a vibrant community - we want to build a vibrant community based on the extensibility features of Visual Studio. Blogs, forums, shared code projects, webcasts, etc. We want to build a dynamic and exciting developer community where ideas are freely exchanged.

So to sum it up, I am very excited about joining the team. The VS SDK team has been doing an awesome job shipping the SDK. We have been shipping a CTP every month and a full release every 4 months. If you are interested in VS extensibility, you should subscribe to some of my teammates' blogs as they contain a lot of useful information.

Anyone can start extending VS with the VS SDK. It's free and there is nothing to lose. Just go to https://www.vsipmembers.com, sign in with your Passport account and download!

- James