Interesting to see the news that Paul Vick (long time VB guru) is moving over to the Oslo team. As Darryl Taft notes, this is telling evidence of how important the Oslo initiative at Microsoft is shaping up to be.

Oslo is Microsoft’s upcoming visual modelling tool (we covered it here a few days back).

Paul announced his move on his blog, and took pains to reassure the VB faithful that he won’t be going too far:

Even though I’ll be spending a good bit of my time on Oslo, though, I’ll still going to be an active member of the VB community. I’ll still be talking about VB on this blog, opining on the language and it’s future, and, I’m sure, continuing to answer lots of questions. I’ll be continuing to use VB and am really excited where the product is going in this release and the next one (but more about that at the PDC!).

Don Box, who looks after the Oslo team, was as succinct as ever over the announcement, providing the following sum total:

Paul just joined my team to work on the Oslo language, specifically the parts covered in this talk.

I can’t put into words how happy I am that Paul signed up to help us birth this baby.

Darryl’s analysis is excellent and there’s nothing much we can add to the subject – just go read his post here.

You can follow Paul on Twitter here.

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Ever wondered how Microsoft staff are appraised? And in particular someone in an evangelist or community focused role. It’s an interesting process. But basically it comes down two things:

• Creating & delivering content
• Increasing Community involvement

Charles Sterling, a program manager on the VSTS team has given a good, honest reveal of his role and the KPIs. (For the uninitiated NSAT stands for ‘net satisfaction’)

It is refreshing to see such transparency coming from the various teams. So whilst on one hand you may not like that they are strategically focusing on increasing user groups (you thought they were just being benevolent in their community involvement didn’t you?), on the other it shows that you can count on some support in that area.

This is good news for some, since if the rumours are true there was an outcry down in Australia when a pizza budget for user groups got the chop recently.