Suggestions on Suggestions?

Suggestions, though fewer in number than bugs, receive a disproportionate amount of traffic on the PFC. Some issues, such as the C# Edit and Continue suggestion has received over 200 votes and has a long and heated discussion thread attached. Given the enthusiasm surrounding suggestions, we would love your help in addressing possible improvements to the suggestion reporting/responding process. If you have thoughts on this matter, please leave a suggestion J.

Suggestions are treated in the same way bugs are – that is, they are ported into our internal bug tracking database. This is valuable because the suggestion doesn’t die in a black hole where the customer never receives a response. Since suggestions are very different from bug reports though, we want to make sure we’re offering the right experience in this area.

Additionally, there is quite a bit of Microsoft bug resolution terminology that may not make sense to customers, especially in the context of suggestions. For example - what does it mean if a suggestion is resolved as “Won’t Fix” or “Postponed?” Internally we define “Won’t Fix” to mean “we’ll never fix this” and “Postponed” to mean “we will consider it for the next version, but it won’t be implemented in Whidbey”. Further, if we close a resolved suggestion, does that keep you from voting on it and continuing the discussion thread?

Marie Hagman

VS Core Program Manager