Brian H. Prince

The Microsoft Visual Studio Design Research Team is looking for participants to give us direct feedback on our development tools, languages and libraries! Opportunities include usability studies of upcoming features, focus groups where we explore new ideas, as well as 1:1 interviews.

Is this just about Visual Studio users?

You do NOT need to be a Visual Studio user! We are looking for all kinds of developers using a variety of tools and technologies.

What do you get out of it?

When you are selected to participate in one of our research studies, benefits include a combination of the following:

· A chance to see and use upcoming tools, features, and language/library enhancements

· Interact directly with members of our development teams to discuss your requirements for efficient and effective tools,

· Directly influence future design decisions, and

· Receive a choice of a Microsoft product from our gratuity list - ranging from Visual Studio Pro thru Xbox games!  

We have a brief enrollment form that will ask you a few questions about your company, your job, and the software and languages you actively use. We will contact you as soon as we have a research study that matches your specific background and/or interests.

Enrollment Form

This enrollment should only take 3-5 minutes to complete.  Please note that the Enrollment link originates from Microsoft User Research and is hosted by our survey software provider.   Visit http://www.microsoft.com/userresearch/studies.aspx if you have any concerns. Please note that regrettably government employees and non-U.S. residents are not eligible for a Microsoft gratuity – but we would still welcome your feedback.  

My super awesome team member, Rangy Pagels, has rebuilt his Team System Café web site from the ground up using some of our latest technologies. If you are interested in, or want to get more out of TFS, then this is the web site for you. I will Randy share the love in his own words.

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What is Team System Café?

Team System Cafe was developed specifically as an information portal to service customers, teammates, partners, and community.

What does Team System Café do?

The Team System Café aggregates and showcases the latest information concerning Visual Studio, Team Foundation Server, product information resources.  This is accomplished through Freshly brewed news, Slides & Articles, Help & How To’s, FAQs, Online Training links, Upcoming event links, Practical tips, and a What’s Brewing blog area.

When do I use Team System Café?

· If you’re looking for answers to common questions, spend a minute and look here first.

· If you’re looking for updates to common customer problems, spend a minute and look here first.

· If you’re looking for news and information on our dev tools, spend a minute and look here first.

· If you’re looking for the newest presentations on product features, spend a minute and look here first.

Please consider the Team System Café as your “first line” resource of information. I’m committed to keeping this site updated and would welcome any material/suggestions you have for posting.  Please forward the URL to anyone who you think would benefit from this information.

How was Team System Café built?

This site has been designed using Asp.Net MVC 3, the Razor view engine, scaffolding, NuGet, Entity Framework 4.1, C# 4.0, and .Net Framework 4. The backend is SQL Server 2008 R2. ASP.NET MVC gives you a powerful, patterns-based way to build dynamic websites that enables a clean separation of concerns and that gives you full control over markup for enjoyable, agile development. ASP.NET MVC includes many features that enable fast, TDD-friendly development for creating sophisticated applications that use the latest web standards.  It was a wonderful experience designing and coding this site using MVC.  A special thanks to Brandon Satrom for being there in a few sticky spots.

Yes, today is finally the day that we release VS2010 and .NET4. I have been looking forward to this day for a long time. I think this is a phenomenal release, with a lot of great new features that help you build better systems, write better code, and be a more productive developer.

We are holding a series of launch events over the US over the next few months. Instead of trying to re-word the invite text, I am just going to paste it here. Hurry and register, it is likely that these will fill up very soon.