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MVP Summit 2008 - Part 3

Tues 16/4/2008

Help sessions today - we meet the new help team doing the MSDN  DExplore replacement.
 
Material blow is basically the same as what April said on Channel9. Some NDA material has been deleted.
 
MSDN Channel9 Video (posted 30 Jan 2008) http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=377501
 
View from my hotel room, The arch is the Washingto State Conference Center (where we had some session and ate)
 
Breakfast has been organized at our hotels. So just a quick walk down stairs in the Sheraton.
 
One if the MVPs found a piano to walk up with. I of couse am drawn like a magnet to the pian and skip breakfast with the others
(although I did have organic porridge and hot lemmon drink in the room - Frank take note ;-)
 
Down to the bus, and off to the MS campus in Redmond for the Help meetings.
The Help Experience team is very small at the moment - April Reagan and programmer David Wright.
 
Here we are between session. Dana, Paul (with beard now), David Wright (MS in green), Payl O'Rear (MS), Bill, Char and Rick.
We are in Building 41 Room 2585
 

Session 1 - Help - Future of Developer and ISV Help  (Bld41.2585)

9.00- 10:30
 
NOTE: These are early days. Things will change.
 
April Reagan talks to the group (we have a few extra MVPs and managers responsible for Dev Help).
April and Pauls boss Martina attends as well.
  • April talking about wanting feedback (same sort of stuff she said on Channel9).
  • Gave some history of VS Help 2.0.
    • The help teams move out of dev div. So new help team formed within DevDiv.
  • Want a complete rewrite of MSDN Help.
Focus on the basics. F1 and Search. Filtering.
Faster. Use more efficient algorithms.
Search: will probably be WDS - Windows Desktop Search.
 
 
Me and April Reagan. She's a good sport. That slide is the logo for this conference. 
 

Session 2 - Help Brainstorming (Bld41.2585)

11:00-12:30

April and David deep dive

Simple approch - ZIP files and Windows Desktop Search.

<snip>

Lunch

Every day we have  lunch magically appear outside the room.

Lunch
  
Outside Building 41 (Where Paul works). Char talking to family back in Boston.
 

Session 3 - Help - Help requiements Review (Bld41.2585)

13:30-15:00

Review of MVP HelpEx ideas. We talked though the 2005 Help brainstorm with April and Paul.

I thought this was vey useful and showed April the sorts of things that interest the Help Authoring
people -- Since April is mostly focused on MSDN in the short term.

 

Session 3 - Help - Bringing localized VS and .NET Framework to the new markets through the new MSDN Translation Wiki (Bld41.2585)

15:30-17:00

This group is from all over the world. Apart from the core languages (Spanish, French?) which are translated by expert
3rd parties, they now have an MSDN online with an Eng / Foreign Lang split screen. And the wiki interface
allows them to edit the MSDN foreign language sentence by sentence. Very interesting work.
 
All done by volentees around the world. You and I could do it if we knew a second language.
 
Christina and her team. Christina is Italian. The girl on the right is spanish. They also had French and Brazilian staff and many more.
 
See the split screen - Eng on left.
 
This is a page I've never seen before. It uses the strings that have been translated and stored in the database to translate your text
 
If you check that box (left bottom) you leverage the MS translations strings. Leave unchecked to use a third party app to translate.
 
Dana and Cristina (right) and Spanish speaking team member.
 

Dinner - with Windows CLient Group

Later we had dinner with the windows client group

Ummm. Paul is actually playing the drunk here. :-)
 
 

 
  • Go to MVP Summit 2008 - Part 4 (UA related sessions for Help MVPs)