Once the platform is available, the developer community will begin to grow. As you succeed in driving the masses of developers to your platform, it's inevitable that they'll start to hit barriers in delivering solutions based on your platform to their customers. Regardless of whether these issues are bugs in your product or unintended uses by the developers, it's critical to help them succeed in the long run. With the right community infrastructure and support in place, the platform can greatly benefit from the developer masses.
How we do it
Once a baseline infrastructure is in place with forums, blogs, wikis, and other conversation mechanisms, we work from within the community to identify the scenarios customers are getting stuck on. If the answers are readily available, we guide the community. If not, we work to figure them out.
We've delivered a full service portal for Microsoft's Imagine Cup Software Design Invitational that enables student developers in North America to actively participate in the world's premier technology competition. We've analyzed the Windows community sources, such as newsgroups and online forums, and used the results to improve the materials that guide developer practices.