C# Community Review
One of my responsibilities is overseeing the C# team's involvement in community, where community is anything we do that has direct customer touch. Everything from working with MVPs to design reviews on new features to the C# Dev Center. Duncan, Dan, and I collaborate on the whole community effort.
We now have a process where we do quarterly reviews of our community process, and we had our first quarterly review, which consisted of all the C# PM team and the first and second level managers of the three of us. Getting the review ready consumed a considerable amount of time in the past few days, but except for the fact that we only got through about half the slides in two hours, the review went quite well.
Which brings me to the point of this post.
If a friend came up to you and said, “I'm thinking of using C#, but I'm concerned that there isn't a good community around it”, what would you say? What are the good things about the C# community? What are the bad things? If you wanted us to change one thing, what would it be?
I'll summarize and post so that you don't have to read the comments.
Comments
Anonymous
May 03, 2004
This applies to not just C# but to all of MSDN:
Merge the developer centers. It's a good idea to have different developer centers, however because there is not enough content for each center, they all contain basically the same links and I never visit them. I find myself going to gotdotnet.com, winforms.com and asp.net to get a summary of all the new articles posted.Anonymous
May 03, 2004
Specifically for C#, it's the yougest of the VS.NET languages with only around 3 years of existence. This is compared to BASIC's 40.
Naturally, the community is going to be small. But it's a fairly tight-knit group of good people. It's rarely taught in academics (compared to Java or VB), so most people who use it came to it willingly, and this leads to a good level of devotion.
C#'s community is burdened by a lingering sense of anxiety about the future of the language. It's very young and not well established. What we need is an announcement of a major commercial product from Microsoft where C# is the primary development language.Anonymous
May 03, 2004
I would say that there is a very good C# community. There are numerous blogs on the subject, in addition to mailing lists (such as DevMentor - http://discuss.develop.com). I haven't really looked at the C# DevCenter at MSDN at all, but I don't really think that I need to, with all tlhe MSDN blogs and other non-MS blogs on C#.Anonymous
May 03, 2004
>What are the good things about the C# community
Your blog! (And others from Microsoft staff)
Highlights of the MS staff blogs, for me, are
- Advice and tips aboout C# and .NET (obviously)
- Discussions of issues where some people would like to see changes (e.g. your recent thread on "const" methods)
- Posts from Microsoft along the lines of "Yes, with hindsight we could have done this better, but we can't change it now". Like your recent post on Equals versus "==". It's reasurring that Microsoft is aware of these issues and that we (users) are not alone in finding these things difficult. :-) Your comments are encouraging, even when you can't offer any improvements.Anonymous
May 03, 2004
Great, Question Eric.
There have been other posts that I've read recently (on blogs and on Channel9), that people are really "amazed" that Microsoft is "opening the doors" to their/our devs, and they say the best possible thing that we've done is to help build that "C#" community.
Glad to be a part of it!Anonymous
May 03, 2004
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May 03, 2004
Good things: It really exists and there are some really cool people around. GotDotNet!. Finally it is possible to talk with MS people and get real answers. Lots of nice little coding projects.
Bad things: Too many participants that haven't released any useful code but are considered (blogging) heros. A developer community should promote good developers which do exceptional software.
Ideas: I'd love to see a feature that allows me to ask some MS guy a question via his blog and get the response blogged. This kind of works through "Contact" sometimes but "Post a question" sounds a lot more inviting.Anonymous
May 03, 2004
I'd say (and this is just stream-of-consciousness):
C# is a new language, and there is an interesting community of people who are passionate about the language, and interactions between in and the surrounding infrastructure (CLR, BCL etc).
Because it's in the early stages of it's life, and due to the openness of the team involved, there is a real sense of understanding the decisions made in the language design, and even participation in upcoming decisions, through web logs and interviews.
The good thing about the community is the passion of it's members, the wide-range of skill levels, but still the involvement of "guru-level" programmers in the "I need help" forums, newsgroups and mailing lists. I haven't seen this in other programming communities - sometimes it feels like the blind are leading the blind :)
The bad thing about the community... hmmm... I guess there's no consensus on the "best practices" in a lot of scenarios, so there's often heated discussion on the best way to do a particular task. I'm pretty sure that any opinionated group of people would act the same way!
I don't believe that anyone can really change the way that the community works, as it's a collection of people who aren't easily swayed or moved. I guess I'd most like to see the community grow larger through encouraging passion in new C# developers, and although I don't think that money would necessarily do that, I do recognise that some of the existing "community infrastructure" might not be able to cope with 10x the number of participants and might need "upgrading".
KirkAnonymous
May 03, 2004
The one thing I'd have you change is releasing the NET 2.0 framework in 2005 (if we're lucky). Many MS people in the C# community spend a lot of time focused on unreleased C# features. They sound great, but our company does not use unreleased software. I could definitely understand and appreciate my friend's concerns about a responsive C# community.Anonymous
May 03, 2004
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May 03, 2004
I think the community we currently have is light years beyond anything we've had in the past. It can be better but it's pretty darn good right now. Good job to all.
I'd like to see even more (yes, more) blogging and interaction between core BCL and CLR developers and the community of users. These devs are building the engine that many of us will be dependent on for the success of our products. It is important to us to have some level of access to them - one small change in the CLR today can have vast repercussions.
So, I'd like to see more of the architects and core devs running blogs.Anonymous
May 03, 2004
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May 03, 2004
Finding the community can be tough.
With Perl it's pretty well known that CPAN or Perl.org is the place to start as a "portal". From there you can dig your way down and out into places like USENET, use.perl.org, etc... Perl has one of the better organized communities out there.
Whereas finding C#'s community can be tough. After a year I stumbled across the "right crowd" by following a link in a .sig on a Usenet post. This was after a year of searching with google and google groups. Most of what I stumbled across looked like marketing, sales, and not much like community. It's a signal-to-noise problem, really.Anonymous
May 03, 2004
I'd like to see some improvements in the MSDN library. Primarily searching and navigation. I find it difficult to find what I'm looking for.
I'd also like to see some end-to-end instruction. I know there are complete projects, like F&M and IBuySpy; but I'd like to see the entire picture from beginning to end.
The microsoft.public.* groups are a great resource.Anonymous
May 03, 2004
I agree that microsoft.public.* groups are a great resource. In fact, that's how I found some of the gurus in the .NET xml community and their blogs.
However, often times, questions do go unanswered and I am not sure why some of them do and some of them don't. I don't see a lot of "MSFT" folks answering them but a lot of MVPs. Maybe that's the sign of a good community.
Sorry, it turns out that this isn't really c# specific...Anonymous
May 04, 2004
How about a Road Trip to the birthplace of C, New Jersey?
http://www.njmsdev.org/
http://www.bell-labs.com/about/history/timeline.htmlAnonymous
May 05, 2004
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May 05, 2004
goodAnonymous
May 06, 2004
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May 06, 2004
I think the community has not "gelled" enough yet, but it's mostly there. What we have are a ton of blogs and sample websites with code and articles that need to be aggregated, but first you have to find them.Anonymous
May 11, 2004
I prefer merge not separateAnonymous
May 11, 2004
There is a lot of good stuff out there, but one thing I think is lacking is support for getting certified. Yes there is a training site with a list of tests and some classes associated with them. I'd love to maybe see application samples that show coding principles necessary for both passing tests as well as bettering coding skills.Anonymous
May 12, 2004
This might not be directed to C# only but to the whole .Net framework. I work as a consultant and I would code any in C# rather than c/c++ or any other language for that matter. But most of the time it’s applications that would be distributed to a wide range of people; as an example one was a video on demand application. C# was great to develop it. The application size with the installer was around 2megs but we had to ask the users to download the .net distributable which is around 30 megs if I remember correctly and for not so web savvy people to install that and then run the installer for our app etc is really asking too much. IMHO I would really think if the .net framework was to be shipped as part of XP -or as a mandatory update for previous versions of windows- it would give C# and the .Net framework as a whole a huge boost.Anonymous
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