Helping customers be successful

As much as it is exciting to ship new technologies and products to our customers, it is even more exciting to see customer be successful with our products in their environments.

As you know, a couple of weeks ago we released to manufacturing Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5. I am already beginning to see some inspiring success stories from customers who are using these products. I wanted to highlight just a few of those stories. The company names below are linked to the full case studies.

· K2 is an organization that builds business process management and workflow solutions. One of the big benefits for them to use Visual Studio 2008 is the improved ability to develop and test ASP.NET AJAX-based Web sites. K2 also built an impressive set of workflow designer tools which are hosted within Visual Studio 2008.

· Xcalia is a company based in France who saw the new LINQ framework as an opportunity for them to really enhance the data layers in their applications. Xcalia has seen tremendous quality and productivity benefits by adopting LINQ, especially since a large portion of the applications they build involve heavy lifting of data.

· MethodFactory is a company based in Florida who has been using Visual Studio 2008, the .NET Framework 3.5, and Team Foundation Server 2008 for several months now. I think Jonathan Carter’s quote from the case study probably sums it up better than I could: “Even with the upgrade to Visual Studio 2008 in the middle of the project, we still finished early. If it had been available at the start of the project, we would have finished even earlier.”

· OpenNETCF is a very interesting consulting firm who specializes in building libraries which complement the .NET Compact Framework. They are always on the cutting edge of providing new ways of helping mobile device developers build great applications. So it’s no surprise that the most exciting feature for them in Visual Studio 2008 was the introduction of unit testing for mobile device applications. This has helped them increase the quality of their applications and identify regressions more quickly than they ever could in the past.

· Sogeti is using the new top-down system designer which is a part of the Visual Studio Team System 2008 Architecture Edition to design and model their applications. In fact the Team Architect designers is a topic which Clemens Reijnen, who is the Sogeti architect featured in the case study, blogs about quite often.

Stay tuned to www.microsoft.com/casestudies if you are interested in hearing from more customers who are successfully building, deploying and running applications built with VS 2008 and .NET FX 3.5. Over the coming months, I expect to see more success stories up here.

I am more impressed by the fact that several of these customers have been using Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 in production for several months already, since as early as Beta 2 when we first published a “Go Live” license. It is exciting to see these releases come alive in the hands of customers!

Namaste!