Terry,

>EPS's expertise is at a different point in the infrastructure than the little projects I do. I am not arguing that your experiences and representation of those experiences is anything but first hand.

Actually, I was not referring to EPS -- I didn't work on any "big IT" projects there, although they have done them.

>And the "gossip" I injected into the thread was not meant to be a general statement on ALL corporate IT - it is nothing more than gossip!

OK. Maybe it's a fact of life to those IT people you hear talking.

>Are developers at Microsoft corporate IT - or is product development

Obviously, they would have both. The Developer Tools Division is a very large operation (don't know how many people, exactly), involved in building the tools we use, and there are dozens of other parts of the company.

I do know, from information Mike Stewart has presented, that the Tools Division operates on very strict testing procedures, including extensive regression testing of each change to a tool. More recently, the entire company has focused more on extensive threat-modeling analysis.