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Welcome to DDCPX!

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I am Russ Ryan, a Product Unit Manager (PUM) here in the Developer Division at Microsoft. You know, “Developer Division”. We’re the people that produce “Visual Studio” and the “.NET Framework”.

 

About 6 months ago I made the case that each time we release a product it is the start of a long (10+ years) relationship with our customers. Sure, we put out patches and Service Packs, but as far as the developers of the product are concerned (the “Product Units”) it is time to move on to the next thing and let “Servicing” pick up the pieces.

 

As will so often happen, the squeaky wheel (me) got the grease! We reorganized and formed a team to work with our customers and partners throughout the entire product life cycle. We call this team:

       

Developer Division Customer Product Lifecycle Experience Team (DDCPX)

Partnering with Developer Division customers to make them more productive and successful throughout the product lifecycle.

 

The DDCPX team brought together three major pieces: traditional “Servicing”, “Customer Connections”, and “Analysis and Solutions”. I’ll tell you about each of them.

 

Servicing is the last resort when we make mistakes. It allows us to release bug fixes to specific customers, to respond to a widespread need for a fix (for example, Security Bulletins), or to release a collection of updates to a product in between version releases (Service Packs). We work in conjunction with the Product Units (those are the feature teams, such as C# or the CLR) who fix the bugs. DDCPX creates patches or Service Packs and sees them through the release process and into your hands. A lot of effort also goes into planning for future releases and into building better patch systems.

 

Customer Connections focuses on how Developer Division works better with you. We talk a lot about “transparency”. This includes:

  • Enable you (our customer) to feel influence over the direction of the product and to share ownership of the outcome. It includes things like specification sign-offs and product feedback (did you use Ladybug?).
  • Increase your trust in the people building the product. This includes blogs by Microsoft personnel and biographies of key people,
  • Creating self-sustaining, vibrant user communities around our product (have you seen the MSDN Forums?)
  • Communicate early and often on our product plans and roadmaps.

 

Analysis and Solutions is a group that tries to measure ways that we can improve the supportability and serviceability of our products and produce “after-market” solutions to help. For example, we discovered that Product Support spends a long time helping you debug complex problems in managed code. We developed a “managed stack explorer” to examine running processes and get more detailed debugging information. Some of the ideas we are currently examining are:

· A tool for validating the state of your .NET Framework installation. It would be able to detect and fix common misconfigurations or corruptions.

· A tool for bulk editing permissions in Team System Foundation Server.

· A tool to convert VC++ project files to MSBUILD format files.

 

We want to hear from you and get your suggestions on how we can “make you more productive and successful throughout the product lifecycle” .

What would you like to hear about in the next installment?

Comments

  • Anonymous
    October 10, 2005
    First, I'd like you to enable anonymous comments. If you'd like, you can moderate them, I don't mind ;)

    Second, I'd like those hundreds of patches for VS2003 to be put together into a Service Pack or something. That the bugs can be easily found on the internet, not just in newsgroups. And that there's support for the patches that aren't in Service Packs yet.

    I know of a few bugs that can occur in .NET 1.1, ASP.NET, VS.NET. When I want to fix them, I must call Microsoft and get a link to the (temporary) download. Now when I want to deploy me product at a client, the client has to call Microsoft again and get the same patch? And it's not supported? How can this be? And I cannot wait until .NET 3.0 for all VS2005/.NET 2.0 bugs to be solved, like I had to do (and still am doing) with VS2003.

    Thank you :)
  • Anonymous
    October 12, 2005
    Thanks for your comments. My team has recently taken over the role of managing the Servicing organization and we appreciate your suggestions.



    We are planning a Service Pack for VS 2003 (SP1) in the spring that would roll up all the bug fixes. We are also requiring that the Product teams fix 50% of Watson crashes as well as the top 10 PSS (Product Support) issues. We will be making public announcements about this as soon as we have a schedule set in stone.



    In the future we also want Service Packs to fix some portion of bugs reported by customers in the Product Feedback Center. Details will be announced soon.



    The issue of whether patches can be redistributed is a tricky one. We do grant “Licensing Requests” for large scale distribution needs. The key issue, however, is that the “Hotfix” patches are generated at the request of a single customer and tested only in the context of that customers need. The fixes are not tested in the context of the whole product until we start a Service Pack cycle. We plan to announce (and keep to) a schedule for VS 2005/.NetFX 2.0 Service Packs shortly after ship. We hope that this will mitigate the problem.

    Russ Ryan
  • Anonymous
    October 12, 2005
    In regards to anonymous comments, we took this decision to help eliminate comment spam, which can actually be quite a problem on these blogs. I'm going to try allowing anonymous comments and see whether or not we develop a spam problem. Thanks for the suggestions!

    Joe Morel
    Program Manager - DDCPX
  • Anonymous
    March 03, 2006

    What are After-Market Solutions for Developer products?As Russ explained in the first post, one of...
  • Anonymous
    March 04, 2006
    John Lawrence (of Dogfood Statistics fame) notes that the User Admin Power Tool for TFS has...
  • Anonymous
    June 18, 2009
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