4 ms·
MS has tons of development tools available internally that they don't release to the world. It's possible that what you're wishing you had is sitting out on Too
by tesseractive 14y ago
MS has tons of development tools available internally that they don't release to the world. It's possible that what you're wishing you had is sitting out on Toolbox, invisible to anyone outside the firewall.
There's something of a culture of "our internal developers are smarter than our external developers" at Microsoft, so dev tools are often where the dogfooding has been the weakest. It comes from having internal developers who are hacking on things like OS kernels while the external developers have a massive population of coders churning out enterprise CRUD forms (along with a smaller population of more advanced developers), but this internal/external tool gap sometimes really bites them.
- WalterGR 14y agoThere's something of a culture of "our internal developers are smarter than our external developers" at Microsoft... Interesting. I didn't get that impression across 4 teams, either as a PM intern or a FTE dev.
- tesseractive 14y agoPerhaps I'm misinterpreting. But I got the impression that dev tools that qualify to be sent out into the world need to have a primary emphasis on friendliness, automation and autogeneration, and general polish. By contrast, internal tools need to be industrial grade workhorses, and if you can improve them by putting a better interface on them, that's merely nice. One of the clearest examples I can think of is the difference between their internal workhorse Source Depot and their public tool TFS (nevermind the horror that was VSS). Like I said, I might be misreading things. And certainly the blogging community around their dev tools has improved the level of detail that goes out to developers committed enough to keep up with them.