Mozilla Developers Invited to Redmond
savio13 writes "Sam Ramji, Microsoft's director of its Open Source Software Lab has invited 4 Mozilla developers to spend 4 days with Microsoft's Vista Readiness ISV team. The invite can be found on mozilla.dev.planning and was posted on Saturday (Aug. 19). Schroepfer replied by indicating that Microsoft and the Moz guys are already in contact via email and will follow up on the offer there. This is interesting because Sam posted the offer in a public forum (and indicated that he'd sent a PM, but was posting in case they had an @microsoft.com email filter). Sam also made a point of stating that the Vista ISV Readiness offer is typically only for commercial ISVs."
Opera was invited to MS recently as well.... http://my.opera.com/dstorey/blog/show.dml/419834
For a complex enough project (which I'd argue Firefox is), even with a clean, well documented API, there will always be plenty of questions that can be answered better and/or faster by just asking the developers of the API. You can try to anticipate all possible questions in writing API documentation, but you'll never quite get there.
I just got an email from Microsoft support. This was included:
Please note, since this support request will be handled using Microsoft's e-mail support option, it is highly recommended you set your junk mail settings for the e-mail contact you listed in this case to accept e-mail from Microsoft.com. This will ensure our support e-mail reaches you in a timely m anner and prevent it from being moved to your junk mail folder.
Apparently a lot of people block @microsoft.com entirely.
No sig for you! Come back, one year!
Microsoft also invited Opera devs for the same reason that they've invited FF devs (to make sure the browser runs well in Vista, and possibly makes use of some new Vista apis (e.g. Vista's Common RSS api)). Opera accepted the invitation and Opera devs paid their visit to MS last week.
;-)
http://annevankesteren.nl/2006/08/opera-vista
http://my.opera.com/olli/blog/show.dml/417961
The Opera devs returned unharmed.
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000