A couple of weeks ago I happened to stumble onto a treasure chest of insider Microsoft information through something they call Channel9. It’s Microsoft’s attempt to provide some transparency into their development processes and demonstrate some new technologies that will be coming through the pipeline in the future.
Personally I’ve become quite hooked on all the videos they have posted, it’s not all codemonkey stuff either. For example here’s some of the topics that I’ve really been enjoying:
- Windows Vista – All kinds of stuff here, especially since PDC, demos of new features and tech.
- Going Deep – Advanced topics, Vista Transactional File System, Windows Memory Manager Design
- Visual Studio – Neat features and tips for current and future versions of Visual Studio
- Microsoft Partners – Visits to Microsoft partners for demos of new apps and tech.
Most of the videos range in length from 15 minutes to an hour and aren’t just canned press releases, the format is very much ‘in your face’ with the interviewer using an amateur handheld camera in a one-on-one situation with the people directly responsible for the product being featured. I love these videos, especially from a developer point of view, it’s a great opportunity to see how software development is done at a huge corporation like Microsoft. They’re also really cool because I’m now very excited about what I’m going to be able to do when Vista ships next year, both from a user perspective and from a developers. After watching many of these videos I have a greater understanding for why certain things were done they way they were at the Windows architecture level even though it might not have made sense from a user’s perspective.
I strongly recommend any developers, and especially .Net developers, head on over to the site and check out some of the videos. There’s also a fairly active forum commmunity with developers and users from all over the world talking about technology.
Go Channel9 Guy!
