Scott Swanson - Introduces himself and the new help system in Whidbey

Posted By: The Channel 9 Team | Apr 21st, 2004 @ 10:42 AM

Scott Swanson, lead program manager on the Whidbey Help team (Whidbey is the code-name for the next version of Visual Studio, aka Visual Studio 2005) talks about his history here at Microsoft and opens the discussion of help in Whidbey.

In later videos (coming over the next week) he discusses more of what's coming, but in this segment Scott talks about what the current version of help in Visual Studio is like.

The interview with Scott that'll unfold is interesting because it demonstrates how teams at Microsoft learn from your feedback and how we are responding to user requests.

Scott has more about help on his weblog too (and he is answering your questions there). Hmmm, a helpful guy who manages help in Visual Studio. Imagine that!

If you wanna learn more about Visual Studio 2005, er Whidbey, check out the new Whidbey Developer Center.

Tags: Visual Studio

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miies
Payin' the bills with my mad programmin' skills

Cool shirt, I want one of those! Wink

I completely agree with the shortcomings of the current help systems - Great reference, but no howto. Looking forward to Whidbey (As if I wasn't already..)

Catatonic
You're not shy one horse. You brought two too many

Next Microsoft person who answers a question with "So..." gets a boot to the head! Seriously though, it's great to hear that Help is evolving to look more like a Google search. Help can be painful if you don't know the name of the API you need.

Scottsw

They make us say "So..." all the time you know. It flashes during refresh on our screens all day every day to get burned into our heads... (just kidding)

Catatonic, have you had a chance to try one of the Whidbey Alpha releases yet and see the new Help system first hand?

-Scott

Catatonic
You're not shy one horse. You brought two too many

I haven't had the chance to try Whidbey yet. Visual C++ 6 is still my bread and butter. So far I've only deployed one small .NET project, but I write a bit of C# code in my spare time so I don't fall too far behind.

abs
xml me

Catatonic wrote:

Next Microsoft person who answers a question with "So..." gets a boot to the head!...

Haha, I'm was beginning to think it was ordinary American slang to begin answering a question with "So.." and I just hadn't heard about it before. Smiley

Jeremy W.
that blogging guy

It is actually an American thing. British is "yeah", as in:

"[big boring sentence], yeah?"

It's actually something they train you to do in public speaking courses. Have a few keywords you use naturally which give you a chance to pause but, more than anything, gives the audience a chance to digest for a second.

Good speakers have one word. Great speakers have several techniques for this.

I'm definitely not in the second group Wink

aristo
Aristo

just trying my new awatar...