The best way to make sure they (we, since I work at Microsoft) get the feedback is by finding out where the product is listening.

A lot of products have UserVoice set up, a lot of dev product teams (dotnet, asp.net, etc.) are looking for GitHub issues.

For Windows 10 I'd recommend using the Windows 10 Feedback Hub - if you hate something about Windows 10, post feedback in the Feedback Hub before you uninstall it.

Visual Studio has this page that explains where best to submit feedback / bugs / feature requests: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/b8akas30.aspx

There are lots of us who see your comments on HN / Reddit / Slashdot / etc. but having been part of the Microsoft ecosystem (both inside and out of Microsoft) for many years, I can tell you that there's a huge difference between "I've seen some unhappy comments about X" and "Our feedback numbers show 68% of users want us to improve feature X". Also, specifics are important - a detailed issue report with repro steps and recommendations for what you'd like to see work a whole lot better than "@drunkvs LOL VS suxxxx ikr!!!"

Also, just because I'm an ocd fact checker, Ballmer technically didn't say "open source is a cancer". He said that Linux is a cancer, referring to the strong copyleft license requirements (https://web.archive.org/web/20011211130654/http://www.suntim...). [yes, I very well know that you can run software on Linux without that software being GPL. I'm writing this from Red Hat DevNation :)]

Regardless, I can tell you that our current CEO and everyone I work with is excited about writing great software that runs everywhere.

Well I tried that once or twice in the Connect era. But if you say it will make a difference this time, next time I have issues I will contribute.

And yeah, that cancer line was meant to snarky and cute, not factual. It does not really matter more than me indicating the obvious, that this is a big culture shift if you look at the timeline. I think MS has ways to go too, and the long game is where we will see how it fares, but I want to make sure we encourage the good. Or it will languish, as "no one cared after a while."

Yeah, please try again. The problem with a lot of Connect programs is that they were tied to a specific release (MonkeyManager Pro 2008) so bugs that didn't make the cut for the product release just got lost in space (not picked up for MonkeyManager Pro 2010). Part of the reason was that there were always internal bug tracking systems, which was what the dev team was really working from day to day, and these other systems were just inputs to that.

If you look at any of the projects that are on GitHub now, the public issues list is the issues list. You can see all the dev comments, scheduling via labels, pull requests, code reviews, etc.

https://github.com/aspnet/mvc/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aclose...

https://github.com/dotnet/coreclr/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Ac...

For products that aren't on GitHub, public issue lists like UserVoice have still been a big improvement (in my opinion) because they usually keep the bugs / issues / feedback around until it's fixed, and the votes accumulate so the important issues keep bubbling up.

I had a couple of reports on Connect related to crashes in Edge on Xbox disappear as part of a migration - the best I can work out they've become private/internal. I'm assuming those kinds of things are going to UserVoice and not GitHub but is there some way I can find out what happened in the end?

I am looking into ways to move everything we do off of MS Tech completely because I don't trust their direction with Windows 10.

I posted this because I thought it was an interesting and relevant part of the announcement. If MS was this straightforward and transparent with Win10 (allowing easy disabling of telemetry and the option to control upgrades at all levels) then I wouldn't be looking at alternatives. Although off by default would be better, but they would get approximately zero feedback with that. Best would probably be ask on install with a checkbox easily unchecked.

Whoever decided their .net tools telemetry and messaging needs to be in charge of that aspect across all products.

You and I are on the same page. What concerns me is that really the best work on securing core internals of the OS from long standing problems, such as strengthing LSASS and SAM against pass-the-hash with virtualized, isolated processing shielding and HW age I will be forced to it already. All the talk of Corona scares me, and not even CIS and the big players have guidance since MS has the new attitude of "just trust us already." Their announcing, even with Enterprise SKU, you cannot disable Windows Store, worries me. In my personal life, Windows is something I hardly ever use. But work and Windows 10, being shoved down into the deskop market, is scary. The Cred Guard stuff and improvements are wonderful, but their increasingly we're the cloud and you're the peon attitude also terrifies me.

http://blogs.technet.com/b/ash/archive/2016/03/02/windows-10...

I think that kind of engagement is present on their github repos.

Well, until it is not interesting for them as a PR strategy. I do not want to lose these people when the pendulum swings back the other way.

And you and I check Github. That does not mean anyone being engineering managers care. I am curious what else we can do beyond starring GH repos. I do that, I just do not like my lazy armchair form of support and worry I will lose a culture shift at MS I have quickly fallen in love with after years of reviling the company as a whole, short-sighted or not.

Purely subjective and observational... but I had a few MS guys go out of their way to communicate a bug in probably the most popular node.js driver for MS-SQL (tedious), and it was interesting... There wasn't as much updated on the Github issue, but I was included in on some of the communication issues, and they were pretty open about it.

The person that had poked in was iirc, and Azure developer in MS, not from the MS-SQL team. There are plenty of developers at MS that do follow various GH projects (as happens everywhere else) and will get the right people involved when they see things.

I would presume that by pushing these kinds of projects (.Net Core, etc) out to github, and even the documentation likely won't see things close off any time soon, and not without losing more mindshare than Oracle has caused people to move away from Java.