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

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Description

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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The Discussion

  • User profile image
    ChrisGarty

    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

  • User profile image
    barlo_mung
    A bit off topic but the interviewer was difficult to understand.  It would be good to get him on mic as well.
  • User profile image
    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.)
  • User profile image
    prog_dotnet

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

  • User profile image
    bwill
    You got two out of five right - keep trying!
  • User profile image
    stevem
    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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