Development can have its frustrating moments. How many times have you been in the middle of a project and encountered a problem you just couldn't solve alone? In order to help you through this, Microsoft provides quite a wide variety of support options from Web-based chats and newsgroups to paid premier customer support. The support Web site, http://support.microsoft.com, is the place to begin exploring all of your options.

Some products come with support. For example, Visual Studio .NET Professional and higher includes free online and telephone support incidents. The number of incidents allocated depends on the product, so visit http://support.microsoft.com, select "Contact Microsoft | Phone Numbers, Support Options, Pricing" for details on the number of support incidents allocated to your specific product.

When you call technical support to report a problem, you'll often discover that yours is a known issue and a set of workaround steps already exists. There may even be a Quick Fix Engineering (QFE) patch available that solves the problem. However, if your problem is entirely new, support engineers will do their best to help you work around the issue.

There are also a number of free support options such as MSDN Online Support, MSDN Communities, Developer Newsgroups the Knowledge Base, and officially sanctioned third-party communities. Chances are that any problem you encounter has been experienced by others as well, so you should be able to get what you need from one of these resources.

The Visual Studio product team at Microsoft has embarked on a program known as Community Room where team members spend several hours each month answering questions posed by customers in online forums. Primarily, teams closely monitor the microsoft.public.* newsgroups for any Visual Studio .NET questions that have gone unanswered after 24 hours. This means they answer the most difficult questions, and they also look here to find problems that need to be fixed for the currently shipping version of a product. (To get to the newsgroups, point your newsreader to msnews.microsoft.com.)

MSDN subscribers have one additional newsgroup option. The MSDN team recently committed to respond to customer questions on over 200 managed newsgroups within 72 hours of the original posting. Read more about this program at http://msdn.microsoft.com/newsgroups/managed.