What would you like to see on the DevDiv SE Team blog ?

Hi,

It's been a while since the DevDiv Sustained Engineering (Servicing) team has posted to this space and we're mulling over resuming this provided we find appropriate topics and content to bring to you. We thought it would be a good idea to share with you what our team does and have you, our readers help us determine the type of topics/content you would like to see here.

So at a macro level here's what we do - we're a team of Release PMs handling the release of Hotfixes, security updates, and GDRs (general distribution releases) for DevDiv's flagship products - .NET Framework and Visual Studio.

Hotfixes - these are updates to the product that address very specific customer problems. Each Hotfix has a corresponding Knowledge Base Article (KB for short) which describes the issue addressed by that Hotfix. Customers can get these Hotfixes either by calling Customer Support Services (CSS) and for some select Hotfixes, by downloading these directly from Microsoft Connect or MSDN Code Gallery.

Security Updates -  these are updates that address issues that have brought to our attention by security reasearchers and other finders. Security updates are always documented in a security bulletin and these ship broadly to all customers and are available via Windows Update (for .NET Framework) or Microsoft Update (for Visual Studio).

GDRs - these updates are similar to Hotfixes, but they generally contain fixes that address scenarios shared by a large number of users and therefore we make these updates broadly available. A GDR might sometimes contain compatibility fixes or enable user scenarios that might have been partially supported when a product originally released.

Since security updates and GDRs are made broadly available, the quality bar for these is much higher than a Hotfix and we do much more testing on these in order to catch any problems and reduce the possibility of regressions.

To be completely transparent here, our team does not do all work that goes into each servicing update, many different teams contribute for each update. DevDiv uses a distributed servicing model where each team that ships functionality in the product is responsible for implementing fixes in their respective area of ownership. The centralized SE team (our team) is responsible for building and packaging the fixes, the setup and deployment aspects, and overall project management and coordination of the work across several teams.

Now that we have told you what we do, we're looking forward to your suggestions on what you would like to see on this page.

Thanks,
Jamshed Damkewala
Lead Program Manager, DevDiv Sustained Engineering Project Management and Release Team