New Year, New Team, New Stuff To Think About...

It is quite an exciting time to be involved with smart
clients at Microsoft. Late last year I moved from my role in the Architecture
Strategy team to the Windows Forms team to look at our future smart client
platform strategy. Now of course, Windows Forms is not the only technology that
is relevant to smart clients and there are a number of other teams within
Microsoft that provide key parts of our client story. One of the most important
of these is the ASP.NET team.

Well, after the successful launch of Visual Studio 2005 we’ve
had a bit of a reshuffle and I am extremely happy to report that the Windows
Forms team has been merged with the ASP.NET and Atlas teams to form the “Client
and Web Platform and Tools Team”! This re-org brings together our client
and web frameworks and will allow us to deliver a more integrated client
platform and supporting infrastructure. I now work for the illustrious Brad Abrams, who’s the
group program manager for the team. The big cheese of the whole team is of
course Scott Guthrie J.

We’ve had a couple of weeks for the two teams to get
to know each other now, and I think we are just starting to realize just how
many opportunities there are for us to capitalize on the strengths of each
platform to take client development to the next level. It’s going to be an
interesting couple of months while we figure out what the future will look like
and how we’re going to get there…