The Most Boring Story Ever

"urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />The
other day a reader suggested:

    
Make a blogentry about how you started at MS and so on!

You
asked, but I'm warning you: it's the most boring story ever.

"urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" />I
grew up in
Waterloo
,
Ontario
, which was a piece of luck as
Waterloo
has
the best computer science school in Canada

. I studied applied mathematics and computer science (along with my
close personal friends and fellow bloggers Dr.
Orbifold and Dr. Thingo) from 1991 to 1996.
Amongst its many claims to fame, UW has the largest cooperative education program
on the planet. For my fourth, fifth and sixth work terms I was an intern on the VBA
team here at Microsoft. On the strength of my internship the VBA team extended
me a job offer, which I accepted. I worked full-time on the scripting technology
for five years.

Then
the VBA, Scripting and Microsoft Office Developer teams were reorganized into one
large team (the "Trinity" team) tasked with modernizing and improving the Office
developer story. I've been working on that for about two years now. We've
just shipped "Microsoft Visual Studio .NET
Tools For The Microsoft Office System 2003", which I actually did very little
work on -- that was
Peter
Torr
's baby, so read his blog if you want details. I've been working on the next
version, which, of course, I can't talk about except to say that I hope the name is
shorter. Also, I do a fair amount of work still on scripting -- not implementing new
features of course, but ongoing work like attending security reviews, helping
out our product support and sustaining engineering teams, and (obviously) writing
a blog.