Charles Sterling has a fantastic run down of all the videos Microsoft has been putting out about the recently announced next version of Visual Studio: Visual Studio 2010 (see our posts here). Charles’ list is mostly specific to the Team System version of the product, but includes some general videos as well.

We were interested to view a few more, but found that some weren’t correctly configured – for example this one on how Microsoft use Team System and TFS internally was of particular interest but didn’t seem to show.

We moved on to some of the architecture ones, and they displayed fine. Many of the videos go for 15 – 30 mins so there’s a lot of fine watching ahead of you, but of the ones we watched the information was good. This one, going through some of the new modelling tools (eg UML designers) was interesting (and don’t be put off by the IDE still showing Visual Studio 2008 – these videos are definitely of some of the new templates and functionality in Visual Studio 2010).

These videos started surfacing 2 weeks ago, but they deserve another mention. Worth viewing if you are interested in some depth into the new version coming.

You can also see the list here on the Channel 9 site.

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.