Who We Are and What Do

Who We Are
What We Do
How We Do It
The Values and Principles that Guide Our Work
Next Steps

Who We Are

The patterns & practices team consists of experienced architects, developers, writers, and testers. We work openly with the developer community and industry experts, on every project, to ensure that some of the best minds in the industry have contributed to and reviewed the guidance as it is being developed.

We also love our role as the bridge between the real world needs of our customers and the wide range of products and technologies that Microsoft provides.

Check out our team blogs here.

What We Do

We build a catalog of guidance that is hosted in the MSDN Library.

Each patterns & practices offering, in the catalog, contains a combination of written documentation and reusable source code. Many also include a reference implementation. As the guidance is being developed, it is being reviewed by internal Microsoft product teams and by external customers and partners. This produces a solid starting point for your application and a set of proven practices that you can follow with confidence.

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Views of the Catalog

How We Do It

How We Do It We talk with a large number of Microsoft customers, partners, and consultants to understand the commonly occurring scenarios and the technical challenges associated with them. Then we discover and harvest the solution patterns and engineering practices (including anti-patterns) that have proved successful in addressing these scenarios.

Once we understand the scenarios and technical challenges, we work with product and technology teams across Microsoft, industry experts, and with customers and partners, to build guidance that reflects both the current, practical state of the technology and that is also aligned with future Microsoft technology plans. Often, the underlying scenarios and solutions guidance ends up influencing future Microsoft product direction.

All of our projects are run in public CodePlex communities. This allows continuous input from the development community at large and keeps us honest. We call this approach, “customer connected engineering” and it ensures that what we deliver actually meets the needs of our customers. We also ship the source code to nearly everything we deliver, usually along with a license agreement that encourages source level adoption and customization.

We employ an Agile software engineering process is a combination of SCRUM style project management with XP development practices. Our work area is a mix of collaborative development rooms, where entire teams sit and work together, augmented with private spaces and offices. The layout allows us to run many projects simultaneously. Each of our collaboration rooms is equipped with a projector (used for ad-hoc code reviews, bug triage meetings, and other group activities), and has glass walls that function as giant white boards. We use the wall space to draw and discuss design ideas, as well as to sort sets of Post-it note user stories. We use Visual Studio Team System to track and report on work progress internally.

What To Do Next

We recommend that you explore these links:

View the Get Started with Microsoft patterns & practices page;
Explore different views of the patterns & practices catalog;
patterns & practices releases in related communities.

There are also several p&p community projects on CodePlex, where the patterns & practices team shares their progress on projects as they proceed. You can participate in these community projects and provide feedback that helps shape the final p&p release.