One on Ones With Visual Studio

As a developer who develops solutions on the Microsoft platform, you’re probably looking at the title of this post, One on Ones with Visual Studio, and are thinking “why do I need a one on one with Visual Studio?”. The answer is simple – like with your manager, a one on one is a session where two people (in this case one person and awesome software) to sit down, and through conversation, get a better idea of what’s new and how one can help the other. If you have these with your manager to keep each other informed, why should it be different between you and Visual Studio?

You probably spend most of your day Visual Studio, but have you seen or used all of the features that Visual Studio has to offer? Let me challenge you to see how much of Visual Studio you’ve actually explored.

If, as we have these one on ones, you’re familiar with all of the different aspects of Visual Studio that we talk about, then consider yourself a Visual Studio expert! Perhaps your next role could be a developer evangelist like myself and you can help have a conversation with others and show them what’s possible with Visual Studio. (Seriously – if you’re interested in helping out with these one-on-ones by doing a guest blog post, that would be really cool. Send me an email and we’ll get you on here.)

So what are we going to be discussing in these one on ones? Well, it depends! When I was doing one on ones with my team members, we didn’t set an agenda.  Rather, we kept the conversation dynamic. However, we did make sure to keep to a consistent theme. The theme for these one on ones will be “features are cool but let’s also talk about how they make me more effective and successful.” As we have our conversations, we’re going to do just that. Rather than simply demonstrating features of Visual Studio, they’ll be centered on how those features impact you as a developer, how they make it easier for you to do what you do best, and how they’ll ultimately make you more successful.

Next Steps

With each one on one, I’ll update this post so that we’ll have one place to collect all of our conversations. Bookmark this post, subscribe to the RSS feed, or follow @cndsoldevs on Twitter so that you know when our next one on one is going to be and what we’re going to talk about.

Remember, one on ones are not unidirectional. If there is something that you want to talk about or see come up in our conversations, please let me know. Send me an email, a DM on Twitter, or a message on LinkedIn.

I’m really excited to start these conversations. I hope you are as well.

Visual Studio: One on One Conversations

• Bridging the Gap Between Developers and Testers Using Visual Studio 2010 with Canadian MVPs Etienne Tremblay and Vincent Grondin
• The Basics of Securing Applications with Canadian Developer Security MVP Steve Syfuhs

Comments

• Anonymous
  March 12, 2011
  Waiting ur next post :)