About a year ago, I put out in the Zune forums a question. What if we tried to develop a feature "out in the open?" Typically we do our development behind closed doors, and we do this for a number of reasons: competitive advantage, because things ALWAYS change mid-cycle and if we promised one thing in November, what we delivered in April would likely be totally different, and to get the most out of the marketing splash when the time does come. However, to try to be more "social"...

Before I worked on Zune, I worked on Windows Media Center - specifically, on TV signal setup and recording. Media Center has a really active community (not run by Microsoft) called The Green Button , and working with those folks over there, we started a forum called "Ask Jessica," where Media Center users could ask me questions about TV features. One of my fave things about working at Microsoft is being able to move around the company to different projects. When I was ready to move on from Media...

Our buddies at on10 went down to GDC and got an interview with Michael Klucher. Lots of details in this video - check it: Games on your Zune!?! What? How? When?

As many of you no doubt have heard, Today the XNA Group announced at GDC that XNA, a toolset that Microsoft provides to developers, will now include development for Zune. Here's an important point of clarification: The announcements at GDC are about the new XNA Game Studio tools, which allow developers to create games that run on Zune devices. These added XNA capabilities are the first step toward offering developers the opportunity to design games that could be played on Zune devices, but Zune is...