Announcing The Longhorn Developer Platform Survey Program
Two warnings up front: this is a long post and it's related to work.
As you are all probably well aware, a lot of Microsoft folks have really upped their efforts in the world of “community” over the past few months. One of the benefits we get from this is that there is a lot of product feedback through blogs, newsgroups, meetings at trade shows, etc. While this is really useful feedback, sometimes it’s hard to decide which product changes need to be made or which changes to prioritize based how many developers are affected. Finding a way to quantify feedback can be hard.
Today I’m here to announce the “Longhorn Developer Platform Survey” program. Before anyone gets too excited, however, I’d like to let you know what and who this is for. First of all, this program isn’t giving out Longhorn bits, so please don’t join if you’re only doing it to get bits because I don't want you to be disappointed.
This program is intended to help us get feedback on Longhorn from developers who already have Longhorn bits, whether through PDC, an MSDN subscription, or other channel. (If you don’t have bits, but want them, you can get an MSDN Universal subscription from http://msdn.microsoft.com/subscriptions/.) To sign up for the program, you’ll be asked to fill out a nomination survey that has some basic developer demographic data, such as the size and type of company you work for, the platforms you develop for, and other “classification” data. We use this data to perform pivots on feedback so we can see if there are trends in data. For example, it would be valuable for us to know if developers using WinFS are mostly VB developers (which is just a randomly arbitrary example from me). Then we would take that information and use it to make sure the WinFS tool stuff we do in Orcas fits in with the VB paradigm.
There is also a question that asks something like “do you mind if we contact you?”. This is a question I put in for people to opt-in to. If you say “yes”, then you might get an email from me or someone on a product team asking some follow-up questions based on a survey answer or maybe even a lunch invitation if we’re in town. If you say “no”, then we won’t contact you (although I’m not sure what the default privacy policy is for Betaplace) but we’ll still appreciate you being in the program all the same.
If you continue through this nomination survey and join the program, it might take a few days to be “accepted”. You’ll know you’re accepted because you will receive an exceptionally crafted welcome email (written by me) that will tell you the same.
Every month or so we’ll post a survey (or maybe a few) that contains around ten questions, mostly multiple-choice. You can sign in to take these surveys at your convenience if you’re interested. The questions will reflect the feedback we’ve received from the community, and will range across many topics, from tools to APIs, platforms to samples, and so on. The first survey I’m working on, for example, is intended to help us figure out what to officially call Avalon, WinFS, Indigo, ClickOnce, etc, in the shipping product. We’re going to try to keep all surveys under two minutes each, so it shouldn’t be a time-drain for anyone. The feedback will help us immensely and will give you an easier way to shape the product to meet your needs.
Does this sound like something you’d like to be involved with? If so, please go to http://beta.microsoft.com. Once you get there, you’ll be asked to sign in with a valid Passport account. Once you’ve signed in, click on the link next to “If you were issued a Guest ID by Microsoft, you can sign in by *clicking here*”. The guest ID for this program is “longhornsurvey”, which is all one word and lowercase. Click on the Longhorn logo on the new page. After that there will be directions under “How To Begin”.
The first question you probably have is “why should I do this?“. The best answer I can provide is that this program will give you an opportunity to impact the way we build Longhorn. Developers often say “I wish we had XXX feature“, so we're giving you a better way to send that feedback to us. We also come across a lot of design questions (such as the “URI vs. string“ debate covered at http://www.simplegeek.com/commentview.aspx/95710b54-71ac-4a76-9136-142e801297a1) and we want to provide an easy way for developers to weigh in.
Thanks for taking the time to help us build a better product.