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From Rainier to Orcas and beyond.

Posted: Thursday, May 26, 2005 11:37 PM by Barry Gervin
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This past 3 days I've spent traveling to and from Redmond to visit with a few of the developer tools teams as part of an Software Design Review (SDR). These are a kind of focus group, with the intention of getting qualitative information from folks about what they'd like to see in upcoming development tools. Hopefully I'll be able to talk more about the content after PDC in the fall so stay tuned. It was a refreshing trip in that normally, I'm traveling to either learn or teach. During this trip I was there more to discuss and influence and I got a real sense of just how careful Microsoft listens to the community.

It's fitting that I drove down to Redmond from Vancouver, passing through the town of Everett and past the Whidbey and Orcas islands (part of the San Juan Islands). These names are probably familiar to some of you as code names for Visual Studio 2003 (Everett), 2005 (Whidbey) and beyond (Orcas). For the sake of completeness we should add Rainier as well which was the code name for Visual Studio 2002. Geographically, these go from south east to north west passing more or less through Redmond.

Not unlike the development of these versions, the journey between these stops is a windy road, taking you over hill and vale, and over several bodies of water.  What's after Orcas? Well the next leg of the journey is as ambitious as the following version after Orcas, namely Hawaii. If you look at this path on a map, you'll see that this is indeed quite a leap.

The most interesting thing that happened is that I realized that come Orcas, I'm likely only going to be interested in coding in Visual Basic, and not C#.

Comments

  • Barry Gervin May 27, 2005 1:06 AM

    blasphemy! -- "I'm likely only going to be interested in coding in Visual Basic, and not C#".

    Just kidding, can you provide any detail at all as to why you say this?

  • Barry Gervin May 27, 2005 10:33 AM

    Well I could, but I'd have to kill you. :) More like, if I told you, MS would kill me.

    I't probable best to put it this way. There are 3 mental pillars for developers that affect the way they work.

    Productivity
    Understanding
    Power and Control

    We all use all 3. Sometimes we want very powerful productivity features. Sometimes, we want to have deep understanding of what's going on. And other times, deep understanding moves to Power & Control. Different types of people favour one of those over the others most of the time. We go back and forth, but at the end of the day, which one is the most important to you? The answer you give puts you into 1 of 3 personas, useful in terms of User Centered Design.

    Productivity = Mort
    Understanding = Elvis
    Power and Control = Einstein

    Depending on who you are, you may use a product differently, and it's nice to have features that are specific to you.

    In terms of languages, Visual Basic is more relevant to Mort, C# to Elvis, and C++ to Einstein. While today there isn't a whole lot of differences between the languages, we are starting to see with Whidbey that the languages are starting to cater more to their specific personas. This trend I'm sure will continue.

    Having said that, my main concern is the ability to shift between personas. For example, Productivity as seen in code generation is not terribly useful if the generated code sucks.

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