Well here we are - in the last strides of the marathon product formerly known as Whidbey. Next week, the plan is to go into "Escrow" which means the bar goes way high and we give some the product some "bake-time" to make sure we've got all real nastiness out of there, and it gives a set of our customers to sign-off on it as well. We're still getting a trickle of bugs but we are seeing the "must-fix" ones slow, which is data that says we're getting there. Still some hard calls to be made though. One big upside is that our stress numbers are looking pretty good - we're in the mid-90% passing range which is much better than we were just a few weeks ago and we're down to some smaller issues and are confident that we'll get to 100% in the near term.
So what's a Dev Manager to do? Well I'm doing a bunch of stuff. I'll be down at PDC in LA the week after next, and those shows are always a good time. I'll be hanging out in the "Presentation Track" lounge most of the time if you want to swing by and say hi, that would be great. There tends to be a fair amount of downtime at those things and the last thing we want is me getting bored and blogging my way onto Slashdot again, right? Show me something cool you're doing with Windows Forms! We'll be showing lots of cool things to y'all so it's only fair.
Besides that I'm focusing on recruiting a bit. We've had some people move around and we're getting ready to start a new product cycle so it's high time to bring in some fresh eyes and generally ramp up a bit. It's harder than it sounds though - the resumes all start to look like the same acronym soup after a while. But I'd better hurry, because it's best to bring people up here for interviews when it's sunny and 70 in Aug/Sept rather than when it's drizzly and 50 in Feb.
Oh, and I'm getting my team to crank out a bunch of whitepapers to put up on the web at/near RTM. If you've got specific things you'd like a dev from the mighty .NET Client team to pontificate on, let me know and I'll pass along the ideas.
So it's really not to bad, things are pretty mellow and we're starting to think about executing on what's after VS 2005. We've got some plans, some ideas, and big bets but it's early.