The .NET Community-Building Challenge

My role: Group Manager, Product Design

Microsoft's available online options in the late 90s didn’t offer the kind of vibe or robust collaborative features the .NET team needed to get developers excited and working together with the technology. The team also wanted to connect with their customers in a less “corporate” way to foster closer relationships between the Microsoft teams building the technologies and the development community.

The plan: create a strong visual brand with attitude, create an editorial voice to match that attitude and provide a rich set of social features to foster collaboration and knowledge sharing.

To break free from the corporate mold, GotDotNet blended game-inspired visual design with an irreverent editorial style and a focus on user-generated content -- a first for a Microsoft developer offering. GotDotNet pioneered code sample sharing at Microsoft and created “Workspaces”, a full-featured online project management and hosting environment allowing developers from around the world to partner on complex projects in real-time. The user-centered design propelled GotDotNet to a global following of fans -- unexpected and unprecedented for a Microsoft developer site.

GotDotNet circa 2000

My Role

I authored the original vision and led the team to deliver versions 1-3 of the product. Over a series of months I worked with hundreds of customers and partners to build the case for code sharing at Microsoft, and I convinced the executive leadership team that we needed to fundamentally change the way we worked with our core developer customers to stay competitive with a connected market. Our team was directly responsible for creating many of the social and collaborative features that have since become standard throughout Microsoft's developer network.

The Results

GotDotNet was originally intended to be a short-term solution to support the launch of .NET v1 technologies. Upon its release the site grew faster than anyone anticipated and developed a global fan following at universities and in the developer community. GDN quickly became the instantly-recognizable face of .NET, and at its height contained thousands of community development projects with tens of thousands of developers from around the world working together -- over a million unique users had visited the site in the first year, exceeding traffic predictions by an order of magnitude. The site continued growing and evolving for nearly a decade and fundamentally changed the way Microsoft approached community development with customers and partners.