Mohsen Agsen: Bridging the Gap between PC and Enterprise, Developer and Designer

Should have jumped in here when the show came out last week, but I've been busy on a project here at work and haven't had a time to come over and check the episode out until now.

I hope you've enjoyed this interview with Mohsen, he's a great guy and extremely personable, as I hope came out in this video. He's held a broad number of jobs here at Microsoft, and so has had a great opportunity to see a variety of aspects of how a company like Microsoft works and evolves.

It was a bit of a strange coincidence that I am now the host of "Behind The Code". I'd been doing "The .NET Show" for over seven years now, and just recently decided it was time to bring that series to a close. With such great content here on Channel 9, it really wasn't such a hard decision to make. I had another "show" in mind to develop here for C9 (and it is still in the works), but then the BTC folks said their previous host had moved on and they needed somebody else. Seemed like a no-brainer to take this on since the format was already so similar to what I had been doing on "The .NET Show" (although no more Erica [C]).

The hard part about this particular episode, is that it required me to fly out to Hawai'i to meet with Mohsen and his team. I tried to get out of it, but couldn't. The things I have to do some times.

We will be filming the next episode in December, and my guest will be Patrick Dussud (bio, C9 Interview, blog). We'll most likely be focusing mostly on the importance of Architectural design, and topics related to that, but I'd also like to hear from the rest of you as to what you'd like to hear about from Patrick.

-Robert Hess

You are right, we do have our work cut out for us in order to try to provide world-class tools for the designer. But I think that it is important. And I don't say that from the standpoint of a "Microsoft Employee" who is simply wanting the company to increase its product portfolio.

As I discussed with Mohsen in this episode, the value of intelligent, appropriate, and compelling user experience design cannot be overstated. And yet it is far too often overlooked. We do a LOT of development here at Microsoft as you might expect. And while we also have a lot of designers, it has only been recently that they have been able to really come into their own. Myself, I saw this most with the development cycle of Windows Vista, and how much time and energy was put into the visual design and cohesive user expience fundamentals.

But to truely incorporate these designs often still comes down to the designer handing the developer a bitmap, and the developer using whatever tools he might have to slice and dice this to pieces, or simply "attempt" to visually render the design concepts using normal form controls and window constructs.

For truely great applications, it is critical that designer/developer collaboration is a first-class citizen in the application life-cycle. If we start with the assumption that "developers" are going to be using Visual Studio for their development environment, then we (Microsoft) need to really grok the issues and requirements of tying this together with the designer tools. As great (and pervasive) as the third party tools are, we can't simply leave it up to them. This is problem we need to own, if even just internally. Ideally, we'll be able to illustrate the value of a combined development environment to such a level that many of these third-party designer tools will discover ways that they can seamlessly integrate themselves into this methodology. But to address this fully, this means that it is important that Microsoft produces world-class designer tools which are first-class citizens in application development environment.

-Robert Hess