Thursday, July 25, 2013

Here's your chance to tell the .Net Framework Team what [you'd like them] to do...

.NET Framework Blog - Advise the .NET Framework Team

This post was written by Rich Lander, a Program Manager on the .NET Framework team. He’s also the one posting as @DotNet on Twitter.

Late last month, we released the .NET Framework 4.5.1 Preview. We’re in a spot in our release cycle where we’d appreciate feedback on the pre-release version that we just made available, but we're also starting to think about .NET vNext. A few of us were talking about that, and we thought it would be a good idea to share our approach to feedback.

There are two major axes of feedback: time and place. On the time side, we split feedback into real-time and forward-looking. If you report an issue with .NET Framework 4.5.1 Preview, that’s real-time feedback. If you request a new feature, that’s forward-looking. On the place-side, we generally try to go to the places you choose; however, there are some feedback places that we look at and respond to first.

While I was writing this post, I saw the following comment come in on a recent blog post on HttpClient, about not finding an official support channel. This serves as a good example of why we should be clearer on how to report feedback and requests for support.

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Real-time feedback

We always seem to have a preview release out, now that we are releasing .NET Framework libraries on NuGet. It also happens that the .NET Framework 4.5.1 is out in preview at the moment, too. While releases are in preview, we do our best to collect as much feedback as possible. There is always something that we should fix or change (some that we know about, and some that we don't) with preview releases. We rely on your feedback to determine what those changes should be.

We use the .NET blog to tell you about our releases, and we tweet those blog post URLs on Twitter. The best place to report product issues or ask questions about preview releases is in the blog post comments or on Twitter (include “@dotnet” in the tweet). That’s what @SebM chose to do, above. We do our best to keep on top of those comments. Feel free to send your comments about products that have shipped (that are no longer in preview) this way, too.

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Visual Studio and .NET Framework Connect is another good way to report issues. ...

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Forward-looking feedback

You may have seen in our .NET Framework 4.5.1 Preview post that in addition to describing new features, we reported progress on UserVoice requests. There are a lot of good requests on UserVoice, and we hope to see new ideas continue to show up there. We’re looking at that list as a sort of agile backlog that we consider as we plan for a new release.

I mentioned earlier that we try to meet you where you're at. We look out for feature requests wherever we can find them. That said, we use UserVoice as our primary home for forward-looking feedback. It has a nice feature set and a lot of activity, which means that a lot of you are already there.

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You might be thinking that Alexander lucked out with this particular interaction. Not true. Tweet @DotNet a new UserVoice entry that you've created about .NET and I’ll retweet it. Also, if you have a favorite existing UserVoice entry (again, about .NET) but you don’t think it's getting enough attention, tweet that to me (@DotNet) as well. The goal is to get a lot of people voting on the .NET UserVoice requests so that we feel confident about the relative priorities, as set by a large set of .NET developers.

Here are the primary forums to report feature requests about .NET:

  • General .NET UserVoice

  • ASP.NET UserVoice

  • Visual Studio UserVoice

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      • So there is your chance to provide feedback, ideas, suggestions to the .Net Framework, ASP.Net and Visual Studio teams. And YES, they do listen. They can take action on everything, but they do listen...

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