Microsoft Product Team Meetings
In mid September I, along with other INETA NorAm board members, had the pleasure of meeting with several product teams at Microsoft while in Redmond for an INETA board of directors meeting.
In our product team meetings, we shared our overall plan INETA Programs for MSFT FY 09 including speakers bureau, regional speakers, virtual presentations and INETA Live as well as regular communications through our newsletter. We will be adding product focus to our newsletters. Also, a common thread for INETA and the product teams is one of measurement.
C#, VB .NET
We have some recent experience working with Charlie Calvert and Lisa Feigenbaum and their user group road show a few months back. The feedback was good and we want to build on that experience. We’re exploring several other ways to work together including leveraging more content produced by the team for INETA presentation.
VSX
The VSX team covers Visual Studio extensibility, ecosystem and the SDK. They are opening up to a much broader audience, and doing it big as evidenced by the recent VSX Developer Conference in Redmond. We can effectively work together by helping them get their message and content out to community influencials to leverage evangelism.
Visual Studio Team System
Visual Studio Team System is growing rapidly in the Application Lifecycle Management space and has a lot of new material coming in the not too distant future. We are discussing some ways to work together to more effectively reach both developers and key decision makers.
ASP.NET
Other INETA board members met with the ASP.NET team. Again our programs were well received. The team has several areas they will explore to work closely with INETA on.
Iron Python, DLR
IronPython 2.0 is getting close to release so they will soon have a lot to talk about. Where INETA can help the most is evangelizing through community influentials in the .NET community. Harry Pierson is very open to setting up monthly Live Meeting discussions with key influencers.
Iron Ruby, Dynamic Languages & Silverlight
The dynamic languages team is small and resources limited so they have to work in innovative ways for product evangelism. Iron Ruby has two distinct marketing objectives – moving Ruby developers to .NET and moving .NET developers to Iron Ruby. INETA can help with the later by reaching to our user groups. The dynamic language teams have a lot to say, we can help them get it out.
Virtual Earth
Mark Brown has some exciting new releases with Virtual Earth where INETA can play an important role. Just released is Virtual Earth Web Service. Mark has a VE Deep Dive web cast on Oct 3rd so we’re jumping in to help with a special newsletter focused on VE.
Patterns and Practices
I didn’t personally have the opportunity to meet with this group but others did and they were well received. The group has an objective of extending awareness and reach among architects and developers. INETA can help by getting content and information out to influential user group members for presentation and demonstration.