The Silverlight Toolkit team is on top of your feedback

Earlier this week, Jesse Liberty posted some great tips for providing the Silverlight Toolkit team the right amount of information to help solve your issues. On the team, we’re all out there looking and responding to the feedback – so you’re often going to get a response by the actual developer or designer that created the control, and we want to work to make it right.

We’re on top of the feedback

In case you wonder if we see what goes on once you post or create an issue, let me just point out:

• Many of us are subscribed to RSS or e-mail feeds of the Silverlight.net forum for the controls
• Subscribed to the RSS for the Silverlight Toolkit site, including new issues and comments
• Our excellent program management team reviews all of this feedback throughout the day, and pings the appropriate experts to look into responding

So we’re very reactive to the community and always looking to open a good dialogue.

Forums or CodePlex issues?

One little ask I know that I have is that you try using the Silverlight.net forum before creating a new issue on CodePlex – this is because often we’re able to resolve machine configuration problems, suggest simple solutions, and so on. If the diagnosis is an issue, we’ll often recommend the opening of an issue.

The forums are the easiest place for us to quickly work through issues, since issues aren’t really setup for having conversations and diagnosing on-the-fly.

Mirrored issues

We have a rich infrastructure built up that ties our Microsoft internal Team Foundation Server (TFS) to the CodePlex site. As a result, we mirror a majority of the issues and bugs between the two.

This means that your legitimate issues from the CodePlex will show up in our intense and important ship room, where we prioritize and discuss how to move forward and have the right release.

Talk about power!

We’re seriously considering your feedback

If you look at the open issues on CodePlex and sort by votes, you’ll see that we’re addressing the big ones. One particular item rises to the top… and we have heard your feedback very, very clearly.

I hope I don’t get in too much trouble for this one… other than to say, in my enlistment, I see some new files with “VB” in their filenames…

 

The other top-voted issue was to change the AutoCompleteBox’s SelectedItem to be settable, and as I previously posted, we took care of that one right away. It really helps the data binding situation, and was a really solid example of how the community can drive us to work fast and make the right choices in the controls as we revise them over time.

To close, let me just say: Thanks for all your feedback to date, please keep it up!