Effective communication across the application development lifecycle is becoming increasingly important, especially with the extensive use of outsourcing in the IT development industry. As Microsoft reaches out to roles beyond the traditional developers and architects to cover business analysts doing requirements gathering, project and programme managers, designers and artists, testers and so forth, it becomes more and more important that the tooling provided is focused effectively around the transfer of ideas and deliverables across roles.

Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team System is one great example of where cross-lifecycle team-based thinking is being introduced in the tools. The central data store of not only code but also tasks, bugs, requirements and any other activity you'd like to mention is proving to be a great way to ensure all members of the application lifecycle team are seeing a consistent and up-to-date view of the assets. Then being able to tie together assets which relate to each other can have a huge impact on simplifying cross-team communication. You can get more details from the Visual Studio Team System Developer Centre.

Another example of this team-work across roles using Microsoft tools is the pipeline being provided between the Expression designer-focused tools [http://www.microsoft.com/expression] and the Visual Studio developer toolset. The natural flow of XAML mark-up out of designer tools... into developer tools... and potentially back out again to designers is going to be essential as we move forward into the next wave of highly interactive and immersive user experiences that Silverlight can deliver. Anyone with full MSDN access will have access to the Expression and Visual Studio suites already.

To extend this lifecycle communications approach even more, I've been working with an ISV who realised that they needed to provide a reliable, high fidelity  pipeline from a well known 3D design toolset (Lightwave) through a XAML converter so that the XAML can be used in Expression Interactive Designer and/or Visual Studio. Some great early examples are available from http://www.shaxam.com/files/LWPromo.zip and http://www.shaxam.com/files/Dumpster.zip.

'Better together' has been a Microsoft market differentiator for some time and its great to see such examples of cross-role lifecycle tooling becoming real in the developer and architecture space.

Richard Godfrey

User Experience matters.  It took me a while to realise this.  I guess primarily because in my former years I was a mainframe developer and green screen user interfaces were all that were on offer.  I saw the value in software drastically reducing 'process' intensive tasks.  If some software could be developed that meant a task could be reduced from weeks to minutes, then that delivered value to the business.

Of course this remains true.  But as more and more software and devices enter our work and home lives what they are like to use matters to us.  Given the new presentation layer technologies that we've announced over the past months, we have been working more with design agencies.  It amazes me how differently these guys think: Are we making users happier?  Are we delivering what the users need?  They also introduced me to the User Centred Design process.  Which is a fascinating way of approaching the design of a user's experience with a product.

A good User Experience delivers many benefits to both the user and the business.  A recent example of this was with a major retail customer, we were discussing how we could help tackle some of their business challenges.  The retailer had high training costs due to a high turnaround of staff.  Each new member of staff had to be trained to use internal systems such as Point of Sale.  To reduce the training costs, the way in which the users interacted with the systems had to be so intuitive that training was not required.  The decision made was for the retailer to redesign the user interface, removing complicated menu structures and replacing with graphics implemented on a touch screen device.

One of the interesting and valuable lessons here for me was that good, compelling User Experiences are not simply for externally facing products, such as web sites.  Business value can be achieved by putting the correct amount of effort in designing and developing a User Experience that meets the requirements and needs of employees.

Simon Thurman

If you haven't had a chance to visit the MIX site, I suggest you do! There is a lot of positive buzz around our announcements on Silverlight and the Live Platform and probably the best exposition of Software + Services (S+S) I have seen given by Ray Ozzie in his opening keynote - a definite must see on the MIX site.

Our vision for services, much like our vision for software, is to radically improve the productivity of developers as they build next generation applications. In the future, we'd like our customers not to have to make trade-offs between "premise" and "cloud", but instead let these be implementation details.  We want to empower customers to choose what makes the most sense for them strategically and project by project. We are on track to provide a full range of S+S from the consumer (e.g. XBOX Live, Windows Live, Live Mail & Live Messenger) to the SOHO or SMB market (Office Live, Dynamics Live) through to the enterprise (with Hosted Exchange, Communication & Collaboration services). There are three categories of services we are thinking about as a company:

• Building Block – The raw building block capabilities to enable developers to build interesting services (or composite apps) e.g. BizTalk Services which were announced recently.
• Attached – Services that feed into the premise software e.g. Exchange Hosted Services (security, anti-spam, archiving), Windows Live Update
• Finished – Services built for delivery over the internet. e.g. Dynamics CRM Live

Returning to MIX, the key highlights for me were the release of Silverlight ( also checkout the Metalliq "Top Bannana" demo) and the fleshing out of the Live Platform. In both areas, the UK team has been heavily engaged with key customers and the product groups in Redmond. On day 2, BBC Radio 1 (BBC Radio One Keynote Demo) stole the show with a superb demonstration of Silverlight capabilities plus integration with Live Messenger. This work was led by our very own Chris Bright & Paul Cross and is a great example of the kinds of rich user experiences that can be built using Silverlight using any of the standard .NET languages or indeed some of the new dynamics languages such as Ruby.

Since July of last year, Alistair Beagley and Simon Davies have been working with key partner and customers in helping to shape the development and commercial terms for the Live platform. It was great to see the positive reception to the Live platform announcements & updated terms of use earlier in the week and the exposure of two of our engagements with Zopa and Farrelsoft. Both are cool examples of how you can use social networking API exposed through Live Messenger & the contacts database to drive real, tangible business value for both consumers and online businesses.

Here's just a quick selection of recent posts on MIX – well worth a peek:

CNET: The Web, Ozzie make their mark at Microsoft

Michael Arrington (TechCrunch): Take Time To Understand Silverlight. It's Important

Robert Scoble: Microsoft "rebooted the Web" yesterday

As you can see, we are very excited with these announcements and diving deeper into them in later articles.

Chiao

Gurprit