Shipping software is hard. It can sometimes be just as intense (or more so) than writing the software. For many months, my team at Microsoft has been working on some great new features in Silverlight 3 and the Silverlight 3 SDK. I had the pleasure of working to prepare our contributions for the SDK release.
I’ve shipped a lot of software. In fact, I’ve been involved or responsible for the shipping processes at Business Integration Group (BIG), WeDoWebStuff.com (the company I co-founded in 2000), MultiLateral Solutions, and Structural Dynamics Research Corporation (all the way back in 1998). But what is getting released today had a new component for me, something I’d never prepared for broad consumption before: Source Code. My team’s SDK contributions are available as part of the Silverlight Toolkit.
This was a fun endeavor and it’s something I’m very proud to have been involved in. It seems almost ironic that I had to come to Microsoft before I started to make source code publicly available. I’m very impressed that Microsoft has taken on the mantra of making a lot of its source code public, and my team has always considered our source code to be part of our deliverables. It’s yet another reason why it’s such an exciting time to be working at Microsoft.