Community Convergence XI

Welcome to the eleventh Community Convergence. Change has blown through the CSharp Developer Center over the last few weeks. If you are a writer or developer who is interested in contributing to the C# community, please read on. I will devote most of this post to explaining what has been happening on the developer center, and how you can help in this site's evolution.

The C# team is gaining considerable freedom in its ability to shape its Developer Center. The front page in particular has been opened to allow for contributions from the C# team, and from our community.

Community

In and of itself, a compiler has no value. The C# language only comes alive when a developer sits down at a desk and begins to write code.

A successful tool like Microsoft's C# compiler is used every day by hundreds of thousands of people. Here at Microsoft, over a thousand people work day in and day out to create the Visual Studio IDE, the .NET framework, and the C# language.

The compiler itself has almost no tangible being. It is just abstract bits, tiny molecular patterns on a hard drive.

The C# community, on the other hand, teams with life. All over the world, small groups of people move heaven and earth to create the products that drive our industries, and that knit together the millions of people who use the Internet. All over the web, groups of C# developers come together and talk about their craft, and share their war stories.

Share Your Knowledge

The C# Developer Center is the de facto home page of the C# community. This is the place where the C# team and the C# community can sit down together and share ideas.

Now that C# team has gotten control over a majority of the front page of this site, we want to share it with serious developers who are passionate about C#. If you have a talent for writing, or a deep knowledge of some technical area, we want to hear from you.

You may have noticed that a series of movies by the C# team have been showing up over the last month on the Developer Center. This is one way we can step forward and allow you to get to know us better. With the introduction of a chapter from Mark Michaelis's new book, Essential C#, we have also begun giving members of the community a presence on this page.

Over the next few weeks, I would like to see more community members stepping forward and offering their writings, ideas, or perhaps their sample programs on these pages. Please write me if you are interested in participating in this community. I'd particularly like to hear from book authors, MVP's, and people who have had experience writing technical articles, or experience talking about technical matters.