On Friday I met with some architects and program managers at Microsoft to update them on how the Power Collections project is going after the first month. Generally, the outlook seemed positive, so I get to keep working!

They were very supportive of the general philosophy that I outlined earlier: augmenting the base class library collections, not replacing them, and working seamlessly with the existing base class library collections and idioms. But, they did indicate that I shouldn't "sell my soul" for these precepts. If there are cases where I and the community clearly believe that the base class library is wrong, and Power Collections should do something different, then we should do what we think is right.

We brainstormed a lot about how to bring in more people to review the designs and implementation. Getting broad community support and participation is very important to Microsoft. I'd love to get your feedback on this as well: what am I doing right, and what am I doing wrong? How can we get more people interested and involved? Please send me email or post your feedback here.

Finally, we talked about some of the criticisms of the interfaces that I've posted about earlier. They were mostly sympathetic on the issue of IDictionary<K,V> supporting null keys, and it sounded like they would make that change. On IComparable and IComparer, they weren't yet convinced that it was worth while to split Compare functionality and Equals functionality into different interfaces. Win some, lose some....

So overall, Microsoft is happy with the way things are going. Are you? Please let us know!