Jason Sutherland - What's the hardest part of managing Longhorn's build process?

Posted By: The Channel 9 Team | Jun 11th, 2004 @ 1:16 PM | 63,773 Views | 6 Comments

Do you have executives who virtually watch you while you work? Are you one of a handful of guys who are at the center of building a product that generates multi-billions of dollars in revenue? Are you one of the guys responsible for making sure that Microsoft's most important product ships on time?

Jason Sutherland, who is part of the team responsible for building Longhorn, deals with all that and more, so we wondered what the hardest part of Jason's job was.

On the other hand, we wondered what the upside of doing such a job is. Jason answers both.
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#Jun 11th, 2004 @ 11:16 PM
ChrisGarty
ChrisGarty
Make a difference

Longhorn has been promoted as a 'bet the company' product and release. I had wondered some time ago how the release team is coping with the pressure.
It is great to see that the guys in charge of the Longhorn release can still smile and enjoy working on one the most talked product drops in Microsoft's history Smiley.

Hopefully we'll hear more from Jason soon.

- Chris

#Jun 15th, 2004 @ 9:32 AM
barlo_mung
barlo_mung
w00t
A bit off topic but the interviewer was difficult to understand.  It would be good to get him on mic as well.
#Jun 21st, 2004 @ 1:26 AM
bwill
bwill
bwill
That takes me back - when I started at Microsoft eight years ago, I worked in the Windows build lab.  This was back when we were working on SUR, and IIS 1.0.  We used SLM instead of SD, and there were no VBLs.  Working in the neck of the software development funnel was quite an experience back then - and I'm sure the challenges of the job have not decreased over the past eight years.

10 points to anyone who can identify all the acronyms I used above.  (Ok, only 5 points if you are an MS employee.)
#Jun 21st, 2004 @ 11:23 AM
prog_dotnet
prog_dotnet

Shell Update Release = SUR
Internet Information Services  IIS
Service Level Management = SLM
Solution Developer = SD
Visual Build Labs = VBL

#Jun 21st, 2004 @ 9:57 PM
bwill
bwill
bwill
You got two out of five right - keep trying!
#Jun 22nd, 2004 @ 6:17 PM
stevem
stevem
Can you stand on your head?
SLM is an internal source control solution. I believe the acronym officially expands to "Source Library Manager", but everyone I knew referred to it as "slime" (I had some interaction with it when I was interning at MS in 2000).

SD is Source Depot, another internal source control tool that superceeded SLM. I believe SD shares some lineage with the publicly available Perforce product.
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