Douglas Purdy

Oslo: Engaging the community

with 3 comments

As we ramp toward PDC, we are working through how we want to publicly engage with the community.

One of the first things that we are doing at PDC and beyond will be providing pre-release bits early and often (we have even talked about doing a CTP every 2 weeks).

Our goal is to make our direction and feature set a conversation rather than a fait accompli.

Since we are still relatively early in the release cycle, these releases may have more stability and performance issues than we want, but we think the trade-off for better community engagement is worth it.

In order to help us plan, I am interested in any thoughts on how we should engage with you, your company, your customers or whoever may be interested in this technology.

Feel free to leave a comment or shoot me email at douglasp@microsoft.com.

September 13th, 2008 at 8:50 pm

Posted in Microsoft

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3 Responses to 'Oslo: Engaging the community'

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  1. +1 for preview drops. I’ve been following asp.net mvc with it’s preview drops approx every 6 weeks and the experience has been great. I don’t know if you’ve spoke with the MVC team to see how they feel it went from an internal point of view but from a community point of view it’s been very worthwhile. Personally though I think fortnightly drops may be slightly too frequent. It’s extra work for you, and I don’t think it provides a long enough period of stability for the community to try out the new features (even if the features are incomplete). A slightly longer drop interval allows for more community discussion where everyone will more than likely be working off the same drop, and more blog posts can be written to bring people up to speed with new features. Just my opinion. Thanks

    PaulBlamire

    14 Sep 08 at 11:24

  2. Stability is pretty important. Every 2 weeks may be too much work and may result in not well tested code coming out. All of us out here have full time jobs, so agree with Paul, that we need a bit of time to play with the new features in each drop and provide feedback. I think every 4-8 weeks is more than enough.

    I apreciate what you are planning for the community with these releases. Its a great idea.

    danrigsby

    18 Sep 08 at 13:19

  3. 2 weeks is too close. It will discourage incentive for people to do pilot projects if the code drops is too often. Try 6 weeks period.

    Dody Gunawinata

    18 Sep 08 at 22:51

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