I must assure you that it's a two-way street

. It's fun to code up a language and language services, particularly one which has as wide a reach as VB, but it's impossible to predict all of the billions of ways that customers are going to use it, and without the customer contact, we developers tend to get a little isolated from customers and the directions that they want to head. There's certainly been more than one occasion where Product Support has handed us a customer bug and we've scratched our heads and thought "Oh, cool idea, but who knew that customers were going to need to use the product *that* way?" Ergo, for the past 3 or so years, we've been trying to build up a better presence on the newsgroups, forums, and blogs so that we can help people get the most out of the product, but almost more importantly to get a better idea what people need.
Have you checked out the forums at
http://forums.microsoft.com? A lot of MS folk hang out there as well (including me), and the only reason I don't additionally have a blog that 90% of what I do each day would be utterly tedious to read. ("Triaged 54 bugs today, attended Divisional Tactics meeting to plan milestone exit criteria, verified that VB was on track to meet stepdown goals for known code defects" ... yawn...)
--Matt--*
-----Original Message-----
From: PJ on Development
Posted At: Thursday, January 05, 2006 11:22 PM
Posted To: microsoft.public.dotnet.languages.vb
Conversation: Debugging in VS2005 - why is some code shaded grey?
Subject: Re: Debugging in VS2005 - why is some code shaded grey?
Apart from your kind repply, Matt...
I'd like to say that's great that developers from MS are actually
exchanging thoughts with the developer community.
It's a wonderful thing being able to interact with the real people who
develops the tools we use.
Thanks...
PJ
http://pjondevelopment.50webs.com/