Please welcome Erich Gamma to the Visual Studio team!

Today I am thrilled to announce that Erich Gamma will be joining the Visual Studio team as a Microsoft Distinguished Engineer!  Erich’s contributions have had a huge impact on the software industry.  Erich has a passion for shipping high quality, elegant software, something he shared with the community as co-author of Design Patterns.  He has always had a passion for building tools to make development more productive and pleasant. Together with Kent Beck he developed the JUnit unit test framework. He was one of the key technical leads of the Eclipse project and he has lead the Eclipse Java Development tools.  Recently his focus was on making teams more effective. He was an initial member of the Jazz project and the technical lead of Rational Team Concert. Finally, Erich has worked to bring teams together across the application life cycle and he was the lead of Rational's Collaborative Lifecycle Management effort.

Erich will continue to live and work out of Zurich, Switzerland where we will be opening a small Visual Studio development lab with Erich as the lead.  Erich will join the lab in early August.  For those who are interested in applying for positions with the new Zurich lab you can send mail to CHDevDiv@Microsoft.com to get details.

The Visual Studio team is passionate about inspiring developers to create great software.  We want to make developers successful and enable them to continuously deliver value.  We are constantly looking for better ways to accomplish these goals.  I’m very excited to have someone like Erich who shares our passion join the team.  Please join me in welcoming Erich to the Visual Studio team!

Jason