Introduction

About Me 
My name is Ben Ryan, and I have been involved with developing the Team Foundation Server version control client for the last three and a half years here at the Microsoft office in Durham, NC.  During most of that time, I have been working on the low level source control integration of Team Foundation Server within Visual Studio.  As time allows, I assist my coworker, Michal Malecki (https://blogs.msdn.com/michalma), with the TFS MSSCCI PlugIn. 

I have 14 years of software development experience that span several companies and numerous software projects.  My previous employers include:

  1. Ateb - C development on Linux-based signature capture appliance
  2. Alerts.com - Java development of a distributed messaging service
  3. HAHT - Integration of Java VM within native Windows and UNIX HAHTsite server application
  4. Data General (now part of EMC) - C development within DG/UX kernel's TCP/IP protocol stack

This list is not all inclusive, but it does offer a representative sampling of my background.

Blogging Topics
For starters, I intend to blog about Visual Studio source control integration.  Ideally, I'll cover both what is involved with making a new project type compatible with integrated source control and how a source control provider interacts with Visual Studio.  Hopefully, the latter discussions will provide some insight into how TFS operates within Visual Studio and why it operates that way.

After that, I'm not sure what I'll blog about.  I'm not too concerned given that the mysteries of the source control integration layer should provide me with blogging fodder for months to come.