I’m pretty sure that at CAST Kieth Stobie let it slip during his keynote that there was some sort of testing community initiative in the works at Microsoft which would launch later in the year. I’m guessing that what he was talking about was the new Test Center in their MSDN site. The blurb Alan Page sent me says that it in conjunction with StarWest though I’m not sure why they would partner with them.

So my initial thoughts based upon an hour of poking around pre-launch?

  • I realize that the D in MSDN is Developer, but it irks me that yet again ‘tester’ is being lumped with ‘developer.’ Perhaps we should start a movement to change Developer to Development as we are part of the development process even if we are not developers.
  • I like the idea of trying to bring MS’s internal testing activities to a more public spotlight. Hopefully too we’ll see some of their internal test training videos appearing. Or maybe their tester development criteria.
  • There is already an article posted which is dated next month. Who knew that in addition to their OSes and Office suite, MS has a time machine division.
  • The page which has the Community blog posts is showing   instead of a non breaking white space. Oh the irony, a bug on the testing site.
  • The whiteboard video is a link to ‘get silverlight’ — how is that relevant?
  • shudder a ‘Best Practice’ article
  • Videos which are streaming only do not work without an internet connection (like on the train)
  • Hopefully there will be more people posting blogs that are linked to the Test Center as I already subscribe to the ones linked already
  • Changing my language / locale (in the top-right) should not take me to the main MSDN page, but just change the page content (if it has been translated) — well, if I was testing this for MS.

But the one comment I have about the site that I would like the folks at MS to pay attention to (thus being outside the bullets for attention getting) is the lack of RSS to pump changes to me via the fire hose. I don’t have the time (or patience these days) to hunt for updates I am interested in; just send them to me.

I’m not sure how often I’ll be poking around there (heck, I didn’t even know about developer centers until yesterday), but it is bookmarked. Get me RSS and I’ll be more involved.