Editor's Note

Are You a Visual Studio All Star?

VSM wants to find the rock star developers in our community and write about them. Do you have what it takes to be a Visual Studio All Star?

• By Patrick Meader
• 03/01/2007

We have seen many interesting applications developed since Microsoft released .NET.

You've probably heard about or seen a number of them yourself, whether at conferences or in case studies published on the Web. For example, Microsoft publishes case studies on its own site routinely. These can be interesting, but they often lack substance or they gloss over some aspect of the app's creation.

There's one other drawback to these profiles: They don't tend to show the variety and depth of development that's taking place in today's business environments—the work that you are doing. We want to correct that, by profiling the kind of work that real developers are doing in a new column we intend to launch in the coming months.

Visual Studio All Stars will profile interesting real-world apps. Perhaps you've written a business application for an unusual niche. Or perhaps you're writing applications for a critical industry that everyone relies on. Or a scientific application that enables significant research to take place. You might even have written the oh-so-very-common customer-database application for an insurance company, but done so with a completely different twist.

Whatever you're doing, we'd like to hear about it because it will help us serve you better. You never know: What seems mundane to you because it's your job might seem interesting to other developers. We not only want to hear about what you're doing, but talk about it in short profiles we'll share with tens of thousands of your fellow developers.

If you've followed the magazine since the days it was called Visual Basic Programmer's Journal, you probably remember a monthly column we called Basic Heroes. Basic Heroes was easily among the most popular columns in the magazine because developers loved reading about their own accomplishments, as well as the accomplishments of their peers. We discontinued the column when Microsoft released .NET roughly five years ago because there simply weren't enough .NET apps in existence to justify doing the column every month.

At the time, the column profiled business applications written in Visual Basic. Among the goals of the original column: To show VB developers what was possible with the tool. The column gave developers something to reach for, as well as a way to share the cool techniques and application types that were being created in VB. Applications profiled ranged from a medical charting app, to an energy management app for a utility company (not Enron), to an application on Wall Street for managing trading, to a sales-order application for a car-repair shop a few blocks from the magazine's offices.

We know there are many cool applications out there in .NET today, as well, and we think it is a great time to talk about them. Of course, much of the success of this new column will depend on you. Assuming we get enough interesting proposals that feature .NET in business environments, we'll be relaunching the column sometime in the next few months.

If you're interested in having your application or project profiled, please write to us at [email protected] and and put "VS All Stars" in the subject line. Be sure to tell us what the app does, who it is for, how many people use it, how many developer hours went into the app's creation, and any other details you think people would find interesting. Screenshots of your application in action are also a big plus, because it lets us see what you're doing graphically.

Remember: VSM's mission is to help professional developers program better and faster, so we're most interested in apps that have a business focus and show off what is possible using the

.NET toolset. You'll need to include a phone number and e-mail address for whomever you want to be the point person for discussing your application. If we select your application, we'll conduct a short interview with your point person and request a high-resolution digital photo of the point person or the core members of the dev team that created the app, as well as one representative screenshot.

Good luck, and we look forward to hearing from you.