C# this week: 1/28/2005

The dev team came out a swinging this week. We started with a fairly high amount of bugs and last week they did a great job of exceeding our expectations of fix rates, by fixing about 120 bugs. This week the C# release team expected a slowdown - hey we thought, all the easy bugs went last week right? We were so wrong. Andy our dev manager (until Steve shows) pulled out the big guns. The devs were asked to "run dark" - i.e. they concentrate on fixing bugs solely. Wed and Thurs night food was brought in to feed the dev team. And man did they produce. By Thursday, we had about 130 fixes in...with one day to go. Amazing. As the french dude in "Along came Polly" would say: "Solide". Oui, oui - tres solide.

The rest of the team planned this week to do an appweek. They organized into teams and picked projects to do. At some time we would like to release these as samples to the community, so I'll talk more about them later, but the projects ranged from editor add-ins to windows side bars and other cool stuff. What this resulted in was a ton of bugs, and most were good. Appweeks do a great job in helping us assess quality of the product and getting user bugs out. Its pretty easy to find the people finding painful bugs - just wander the hallways and follow the gnashing of teeth. It wasnt unusual to find a PM stalking down a hallway, finding a dev who owned a feature and showing the hapless fellow his error in ways.

We continued to trend down at a good rate for bugs. The release team began to triage the bugs of devs who had the most bugs this week, to get them in line. We moved some bugs, not huge ones, to the RTM milestone and contnue to raise the bar on what needs to get fixed for Whidbey Beta2. Its been very fatiguing everyday for 2 hours going over all incoming bugs and we have thrown (ok, fine Jay, I have thrown) much heckling at Kartik who excused himself from gritty war torn triage, for the soft comforts of Appweek.

On the good side, I've been looking into getting a Windows Media Center PC. The Dell one seems particularly attractive to me...sort of like what a glass of water looks like to a desert wanderer. I hope to pull the trigger on that soon.

Oh and record profits are announced by MS. Nice, hope the stock goes up. I need $$$ to pay for the PC. Yes, I am fully aware the stock has not gone up. Sob.