Random stuff

I've been a little busy lately with various things happening.

The MVP summit happened earlier this week. I actually got to meet a couple of our MVP's who I know by blogs/postings - Mahesh Chandramouli, Michael Giagnocavo, Nicholas Paldino, Mark Michaelis and Wally McClure among others. Wally described to me his Webspider app which he has up on his blog - it was plenty cool. It constantly amazes me how much I as a PM specialize in an area...but there is so much to know about how the whole software ecosystem works together. And our cool MVP's tend to know this through real life experience spent with using C# with Message Queues, Databases, IIS etc. New resolution - start writing programs that utilize random other technologies.

I've also been trolling around for feedback on the community drop. As has been noted its not quite as stable as the Alpha, but thats kind of expected from the way we build software. The process works roughly like this - as we start shutting down our product, we define a bug bar for the bugs we will take. We hold a shiproom, with a lead/group of people, who are tasked with saying yea or nay on each bug. This is a tough process - often people make the cardinal mistake of talking about the technical aspects of the bug. They tend to be put back on the track of defining the customer scenario it breaks first. Then people evaluate the risk of this bug, evalaute whether the bug meets the bug bar, and say yea or nay. It can be stressful - you want to come in to the meeting knowing everything thats important about the bug. Anyway - for the tech preview the bug bar was high to start with, so we took really critical bugs only for it.

Lastly, an amusing story about a geek doing SEAL training here. I've been really tired all week, as I've started training much more intensely for a couple of upcoming tournaments. We ran 400's yesterday at local track and I'm feeling it today.