Monday, May 11 2009
Members of the Microsoft Expression Web 2 development team headed south to the SonicFog Headquarters in Browns Point, WA for a collaborative working session. This was a Contextual Design Meeting in support of the development of Expression Web 2. The Microsoft team was led by Expression Web Evangelist, Anna Ullrich. Ullrich mentioned that fully 50% of software developers, "consider themselves freelancers" and that her team desired to enhance Expression Web to meet these developers needs.
SonicFog's role was mainly consultative and demonstrative. "The Microsoft team asked the questions and took notes as we answered their questions and demonstrated our work flows," said SonicFog CEO, Tedd Caldwell.
The SonicFog VP of Technology was "impressed by the fact that Microsoft wanted to get down in the weeds with the grunt developers."
A follow-on meeting is planned for the near future at the Microsoft campus that will go even deeper "into the weeds" where the Expression Web Team will observe SonicFog developers as they write code that generates the markup for Content Management Systems' (CMS) components, modules and plugins.
Caldwell noted, "We look forward to working with Microsoft in their efforts to support the little guys in the web development arena."