The Moth

When I get emails for support that are not directly related to my blog posts/events/screencasts I usually point the person to an appropriate free online support forum and newsgroup (e.g. for mobility questions I point them to these two and for questions in other domains I find the appropriate forum).

Occasionally the email (or phone call as the case was recently) is much more involved and for an educated answer the helper must gain a lot more context and insight into the environment. In these scenarios I recommend consultancy (not the body shop variety where people get installed in your office, but true advice from experts on a as needed basis). If the company is serious about their architectures staying up to date with where the Microsoft platform is going and about getting advice ranging from high level strategic issues down to performance optimisations in a certain implementation, then I suggest Microsoft Application Development Consulting.

As a customer you buy a set of consulting (150-2400) hours that you can use as you see fit during the year (maybe a presentation on some new technology of interest, a code review, an architectural planning meeting, help in building a proof of concept, debugging a nightmare bug etc). You are assigned an ADC that is effectively on-call for your company, (but who can decide to bring other members of the team as he sees fit – at the same rate). The ADC understands your product(s), environment(s) and people, and can be used remotely and/or on-site as the occasion dictates. To find out more about the rates, view a datasheet and get the contact email and phone number, please visit the ADC page.

As an aside, when I interviewed here at Microsoft UK 17 months ago, I got two job offers: one being the one I accepted and do today, the other being the ADC role which I am advertising on this blog post. Reasons for choosing one over the other are irrelevant here, but I did have to sleep on it for a couple of nights... As a second aside, when I joined my current team, 3 out of the 4 other guys were former ADCs...