Wrapping up 2006

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Well, 2006 is pretty much in the bag at this point.  Tomorrow will be my last day here in the office for the year.  Microsoft empties out quickly this time of year as people start getting to the point where they need to take vacation or lose it at the end of the year (we can only carry-over a certain amount), which for me basically happens at EOD today.   Wow, hard to believe this will the 10th time I've been around Microsoft for the holidays (come to think of it, I think for my first time I was actually at Microsoft for the holidays...)

The experience of building and managing this project has taken a direction I really never expected.  My original vision for this team was to do smallish projects every 3-6 months, to involve the community, and to really see what happens when you develop software in a truely transparent way.  What's emerged has been something far larger and more interesting.  It really has taken on a life of its own and provided some great examples of how Microsoft can work with the community to really deliver value in a very agile way.

 Looking back...

  • The Toolkit was born in late January of 2006.  It was very fortunate that CodePlex was starting to come together at the same time we were getting the Toolkit up and running.  The infrastucture of CodePlex has been a major contributor to our success.
  • We launched our first bits in April via an MSDN Download.  We moved to CodePlex in early May.
  • Since then we have done 8 releases on CodePlex with a total of 235,728 Release downloads (wow!) not counting source-tree downloads.  These aren't all unique downloaders, but still it's a big number.
  • The downloads breakdown as 179,724 Full Package downloads and 56,004 Binaries-Only downloads
  • We've shipped 28 controls, 8 of which are from community contributors (and we've got several more coming in the next release)
  • We've had over 2,500 threads and nearly 10,000 posts on the AJAX Control Toolkit Forum, almost 2,700 which were done by the Toolkit team here at Microsoft (does my team rock or what?!?).
  • We have 11 non-Microsoft contributors working on the project

Not a bad year for a team of three (we gained our fourth member just before Thanksgiving) shipping code in a way that DevDiv never has before. 

But the biggest factor for all this success has been the customers who have picked up the Toolkit bits and gotten them working with their website.  We've had to do more breaking changes than I would have liked but everyone has been amazingly patient about it and continued to pick up new drops, make suggestions, and file issue reports.  The addition of voting for bugs on CodePlex has really helped us make decisions on which issues to address first.

So most of us will be out of the office until a day or two after the New Year, so forum answers may be a little slowed.  Fortunately, many people on the forums have done a great job at answering posts recently.

Thanks!