Lost In Tangent

Now that the VS2010/NETFX4 train is about to grind to a half, the vNext discussions are ramping up for each of the encompassed technologies. Why is this interesting to you? Because it’s the perfect time to start voicing your personal opinions. If you’ve been moaning about a feature that you need, or a behavior that should be improved, you absolutely need to tell us about it. Despite what some believe, Microsoft listens very extensively to customer feedback, the trick though is knowing where to give that feedback.

I get e-mails all the time, and I read tweets every day talking about some change request that a developer would like to see made. Unfortunately, those mediums aren’t the best way for us to be able to rally behind. Don’t get me wrong, we want that communication to happen, and we take those comments into account when doing product planning, but in order to justify new features, it’s very key to have as much support behind it as possible, and this typically can’t come from a bunch of disparate e-mails, tweets, etc.

You don’t need to be BFFs with ScottGu (that certainly won’t hurt) or attend every SDR to have a voice in Microsoft. This was loudly confirmed by ASP.NET MVC, which anyone can tell you was heavily driven by customer comments. The same can be true for the Entity Framework and WCF Data Services in their vNext releases. We just recently published Connect sites for both products and are asking for all the feedback you’ve got. This can come in the form of bugs or suggestions. Both are much appreciated and will be directly taken into account. One of the main reasons using Connect is great is that it allows other people to upvote/downvote your suggestions. This makes it much easier for us to justify working on a specific feature (or not too if you’re the only person in the world that wants something added).

Entity Framework vNext Connect

WCF Data Services vNext Connect

Long story short: go make your suggestions on the Connect sites, otherwise I don’t want to hear you complain a year from now about something we didn’t add