Discussions

@Sven Groot'oh!  I only looked at your last post and not the one right above it when I was checking before I replied.

I think a few things will contribute long term to solve the problem.  1) As installers get updated they'll hopefully have guidance on how to play nice and not shove everything in the Start Screen.  2) The app store model should eliminate apps that install a whole bunch of entries as well.

That said I think your idea has merit and you should definitely submit it. 

@Sven Groot: Have you checked out the All Apps view?  There's an option in the lower right that gives you the "grouped" list of what would have  been the Start Menu folders, and the All Apps view itself is alphabetical separated by folder as well.

I'm not on the Windows team so I have no idea what they're planning, but it sounds like what you want is somewhere in between All Apps, and an auto-sorted list.

I've been skeptical myself about all the metro stuff with keyboard and mouse but the more I play with it the more excited I get.  Someone pointed out the right-click in the lower left of the screen and I just about squealed with glee.  You can get to some handy things from there even faster than in Win 7.  I'm sure some discoverability tweaks would make things easier, but so far I'm not really finding any productivity issues using keyboard and mouse with Win 8.  To be fair, this machine is also a touch-screen monitor so sometimes I reach up and swipe rather than mouse over things, but I have a feeling that's the way the industry is heading, even in traditionally non-touch scenarios touch will make an appearance.

It somewhat depends on the forum.  In some forums you'll find people who work on the features you're asking about, in others you'll find official support personnel.  And in many of them you'll find a lot of people who don't work for the company providing really thoughtful answers as well.

If you feel that you're not getting good answers from someone marked as being from Microsoft, I encourage you to use the Site Feedback link at the bottom of the page.  That actually does go to real people tasked with fixing the issues reported there.  Up until I recently switched teams I was on that mail list. 

CKurt is correct, Developer Division is a part of the Server and Tools business.  DevDiv makes Visual Studio among other stuff the team is responsible for.

Hi Blitzd, we're having some issues lately with hardware and scaling.  We're actively working on the problems and I should have a more detailed update soon about when things will start to drastically improve.  In the immediate term we're working with our hosting people to see what specifically is happening right now and if there's anything else we need to do to get it stable.

-Jeremy
PM MSDN & TechNet Blogs

Time for yet another C9 Birthday thread.  Looking at my profile, it looks like I created my profile to be able to post about a week after the site first launched.  If I think back over where I was 5 years ago, and the role that Channel 9 played in getting me to where I am today it's amazing.

When Channel 9 launched I was a software developer at a small company in NY state.  At the time I had my heart set on trying to go join Pixar and do computer animation related work.  Microsoft was about the farthest from my mind in terms of my career path, even though I used the MS platform every day at work.  Then I started seeing some information about this new site.  It was going to let us see inside the "cockpit" of Microsoft.  What the heck was this?

Even though I wasn't interested in working here yet, I was interested to see HOW Microsoft made software.  What were the processes, what were the roles of everyone on the team?  I hoped that it would show us how we could improve our own practices at my job.  Somewhere along the way some videos about the interviewing process got posted.  Between that, and seeing the way that the people in these videos LOVED the work they were doing, I started to think maybe I should try it.

Fast forward to 2006 and I made the decision to apply, and I was lucky enough to be given the opportunity to become a PM on a small team that made Power Toys for Visual Studio.  Open Source software.  At Microsoft.  Working with the community.  It wasn't what I would have thought I would end up doing, but it was a great opportunity so I took it.  Since then my team got bounced around a bit, and eventually disbanded.  Along the way I got to work on building a connection between the Microsoft product teams and the MSDN Forums, and then later on focusing on ALL the support forums (MSDN, TechNet, Expression, a little bit of Answers).  Now I'm working on MSDN and TechNet blogs, as well as looking at what projects we can do to make our sites better.

We got cake today for C9's birthday, and that was awesome.  Great thanks to Charles and Jeff and everyone else who was there, or who has come and gone.  Channel 9 holds the nugget of what I think is special about Microsoft and I'm happy I could be a part of it, from within and without.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY C9!

Hi guys, do you have a link to a video on MSDN that is an examle of this?  Or is it just a general principle that annoys you? 

-Jeremy

You all never fail to amaze.  There are some great ideas on that site, not just for the C9 improvements, but your overall model has some great stuff there.  We spend a lot of time thinking about the best ways to get user feedback (at Microsoft in general not just on the online properties) and I think you encapsulated a lot into a very quick turnaround.

Awesome show, great job!

blowdart said:

joechung said:

*snip*

Yea. Weird, it appears to have righted itself. Now I'm not sure if newsgator was eating things or if it was a problem with the feed.

blowdart said:

JKelley said:

*snip*

Simple, hook up to WDS for the internal search too, why reinvent the wheel? I'm sure you can drag Paolo off Windows 7, it's not like that's important

(And I'm aware I'm part of your target audience, heh, there's a big MVP discussion going one, you poor sod!)