I for one would like to see conversations kept public, in places such as Twitter, rather than being moved to Skype. Then everyone gets to see the two points of view and benefit from the debate.

Plus we get to see who is best at name-calling :-p

Thanks for all your support and kind words. Developer exchange sounds like a great idea, I’ll start floating it around. Keep up all the good work.

The good thing is that I was hired, in part, to address that issue – which I am! All I ask is some respect, which I think I deserve at this point :).

And we don’t talk about Fight Club.

There might be something into getting MS developers out into the community to see how people are using the tools they’re developing. Your CEO keeps saying ‘Developers, Developers, Developers’, well, let’s make it about the devs, right? :)

@Rob: Very interesting. I didn’t realize all that. Thank you for doing that and please keep it up and keep putting stuff out there.

I talked with a few folks at the conf about the whole twitter/TDD incident and I think the ‘Let’s take it outside, on Skype’ was awesome. Sorry I missed it I wanted to be there. I hope it went well.

I wonder if we shouldn’t have a ‘Rule of Fight Club’ where if we get to a point where there’s more than one or two public comments, we take it to Skype and iron it out. Unfortunately, we don’t always have that time, so the moment must support it, but it might be worth establishing some code of conduct for MS Developer vs. Public interactions like that. Thoughts?

I like the idea of a DevExchange but to be honest, I am about as far outside of “The Mothership” as I can get (about 2200 miles to be precise) – this applies both physically and mentally. Case in point, the MVC Storefront thing I’m doing right now runs directly counter to most internal efforts, if not all of them.

I’m not sure if you’ve seen it yet, but the deal is that I am actively seeking out specialists in the community to help me. Ayende helped me setup some core architectural patterns. Steve Harman helped me setup a testable Repository. Aaron Jensen sat with me last week on campus (I was there for the summit) to go over some TDD stuff.

To directly answer your question: I get many suggestions internally, but they’ve essentially given me as much rope as I want. It’s all me at this point – the only major thing that’s been requested of me is to keep it positive :).

As for the developer exchange program, it’s an intriguing idea. I’m pretty sure we do this already in the Seattle area, but not sure if we ever fly people out to the far reaches of the US. ;)