Jim Wang's Blog

One of the initiatives I’m involved with on the ASP.NET and Visual Studio teams is the Tactical Test Team (TTT), which is a group of testers who dedicate a portion of their time to roaming around and testing different parts of the product.  What this generally translates to is a day and a bit a week helping out with areas of the product that have been flagged as risky, or tackling problems that span both ASP.NET and Visual Studio.  There is also a separate component of this effort outside of TTT which is to help with customer scenarios and design.

I enjoy being on TTT because it allows me the opportunity to look at the entire product and gain expertise in a wide range of areas.  This week, I’m looking at Visual Studio 2010 performance problems, and this gem with the keyboard in Visual Studio locking up ended up catching my attention.

First of all, here’s a link to one of the many Connect bugs describing the problem:

Microsoft Connect

I like this problem because it really highlights the challenges of reproducing customer bugs.  There aren’t any clear steps provided here, and I don’t know a lot about your environment: not just the basics like our OS version, but also what third party plug-ins or antivirus software you might be running that might contribute to the problem.  In this case, my gut tells me that there is more than one bug here, just by the sheer volume of reports.  Here’s another thread where users talk about it:

Microsoft Connect

The volume and different configurations are staggering.  From a customer perspective, this is a very clear cut case of basic functionality not working in the product, but from our perspective, it’s hard to find something reproducible: even customers don’t quite agree on what causes the problem (installing ReSharper seems to cause a problem…or does it?).

So this then, is the start of a QA investigation. If anybody has isolated repro steps (just comment on this post) that they can provide this will immensely help us nail down the issue(s), but I’ll be doing a multi-part series on my progress and methodologies as I look into the problem.

Recently, I’ve been playing around with the Windows Phone 7 Developer experience.  Quick tip: I tried to deploy my application to the phone, and got an error: “Zune software is not launched. Retry after making sure that Zune software is launched.”  This wasn’t particularly helpful for me since I did have the software launched, and my phone was connected through wireless sync (didn’t remember this at the time). 

A quick search turned up nothing, and restarting the client didn’t help.  But then I remembered my setup and plugged my phone straight into the USB port and then had no problems.

Thinking about it, I wouldn’t expect this scenario to work, but there was no indication of this provided to me as a devt.

A couple of takeaways as a tester and geek:

1. Bad error messages cause customers a lot of pain.  Fighting for these in triage is probably worth your time.

2. Wired > Wireless, even in 2011 :)

If all goes well I’ll be speaking about WebMatrix and NuGet this March at DevConnections Orlando! I always enjoy coming out to conferences and meeting customers who work on the Microsoft stack. When I went to DevConnections Las Vegas in 2009 it was to talk about what was new in ASP.NET Web Forms, and it was really great to hear all the community feedback about the new features we were delivering.  I look forward to seeing you all in March and talking about the new web development paradigm we are delivering with WebMatrix.  Till then!

Put together this video showing how easy it is to install Wishlist now that we have shipped on www.nuget.org :)  Note that the best thing to do will be to watch in 1080p.