Introduction

I've been hoping to start a blog for a while now, but don't want to be one of those people that starts one and never posts to it... I think I'm actually ready to keep it up!

I've been at Microsoft for 6 years, and until 2 months ago, I was in the Macintosh Business Unit. I started off working on Outlook Express (after working with several other future Microsoft employees like jud spencer and Dave Cortright on Claris Emailer). That's also where I started working with the famous Omar Shahine. After that, I worked on Entourage, the Outlook-like PIM client for the Mac that evolved from Entourage. (The history of the mail clients on the Macs and their names is very confusing!) I became Development Manager 3 years ago, managing developement of Entourage, PowerPoint, IE, the Mac MSN client, and most recently, Virtual PC. As Development Manager, I continued to write lots of code. I've also been very passionate about e-mail, and communications in general. In high school, I ran a BBS I wrote in BASIC on my Atari 800 XL. Those were the good ol' days :-)

After 6 fun years writing Mac software for the Macintosh (and many years of Mac development before that), I got the itch to learn new things. There's lots of really exciting stuff going on in the company, and I always felt a bit removed from it in at our California campus. Well, a couple of months ago, I took the plunge. My wife and I threw our 4 cats in the car and moved up to the beautiful Northwest. I'm now working on Longhorn as part of the Windows Shell team. I'm now a Software Architect on the ConnectUX team, where we work on the People and Groups platform features and a bunch of collaboration and communication features. I'm working with a some great people, like Walter SmithAmar Ghandi, Jon Perlow, Oliver Fisher and Kevin Moore. I've been having lots of fun so far, and am learning a ton of stuff (with no threat of running out of stuff to learn soon). I hope to share some of that soon!