NPT Team Charter

After about four months of working through some hard problems, I’ve begun to center our team on a few core work areas. Based a lot on the feedback you gave me through this blog, I narrowed it to three work areas:

• We’re going to start by building on the momentum of the current Visual Studio Express products. With nearly 5 million downloads, and 600,000 unique registrants, these products have become more popular than we ever anticipated. Our first goal is to deliver an amazing release with the “Orcas” wave of Visual Studio by working with the partner teams and building some amazing content to surround the Express products.
• The next task is to create a strong community of non-professional developers. There are around 27 million of them, so that’s no easy task. We’ll start by building on existing developer communities – both Microsoft and non-Microsoft – to create a strong network of communities, but our goal is to create a community phenomenon more like Myspace, YouTube, or Flickr – a place where people go to share and have fun. Creating this community is going to drive us to create a set of services for storing and sharing source code, ratings, comments, and for buying and selling software.
• Finally, we see the need for a new kind of development experience for this customer – something where programming is fun and getting started is simple. We want to reach out to novices and intermediate hobbyist developers with support for the programming languages they already know. We want to offer a host of domain-specific frameworks and libraries that make it easy to create cool experiences with animations and rich graphics that cross online and offline scenarios as well as different devices, browsers, and applications.

It’s a pretty broad charter, but I think we can deliver on it. In fact, based on some of the prototypes we have already, I know we can.

Comments

• Anonymous
  June 29, 2006
  Sweet.  I particularly like the Orcas tie-in (assuming that it isn't coming too quickly [;<).  It would be cool if there were updates to the Express Products at the same time, to file off some of the rough edges and start-up problems (thinking especially of VC++ EE, which doesn't even have an equivalent of "Build a Program Now!" and needs a much clearer set of roadmaps for beginners).
  
  Regardless, the charter's a beaut in my book.
• Anonymous
  July 12, 2006
  Great Idea! The overall Tuscany idea sounds to be cool. Just want to add my 2cents. If this project is going to be the one to replace HTML/Javascript/VBScript, I hope there is some documentation and protocol design before getting into the development. I am hard to tag myself as hobbyist or professional or anything like that, but I most of the time program as I need and for fun starting from early years on Basic which comes with DOS. Microsoft products make 2 difficulties for me to work on. First, the programming environment is very costy for non-daily users and this issue has been addressed by using VS ToolKits and now VS Express. The second issue is that the non-compliance with the standards or missing the docuements which create a great difficulty for porting to other platforms. Since Internet becomes a more open environment, I would like to see this project to be available for any platforms.