Who is Jennifer Marsman?

I believe that blogs should begin with a description of the author and what they're all about.  I'm a Developer Evangelist for Microsoft, which is a kinda silly title.  But I have the coolest job in the company: I get to learn and play with Microsoft's new technologies for developers and then tell people about them.  I deliver presentations at corporations, user groups, and conferences, write demos, and act as a technical resource to large enterprises.  Over the last year, I've dived into the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), Windows Workflow, Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO), ClickOnce, development on Windows Vista, Silverlight, the .NET Framework 3.5, and Visual Studio 2008. 

I work with a great team of people.  Jon Box, Darryl Hogan, and John Mullinax focus on enterprise strategy, while Josh Holmes, Jeff Blankenburg, and Brian Prince focus on the software developer and architect community.  I worked on the enterprise team for about 1.5 years and recently transitioned to the community team.  I'm based in Microsoft's Detroit office (which is actually in Southfield, MI). 

My background is as a software developer.  I worked at Microsoft's main office in Redmond, WA from 2002-2006.  My team’s goal was to map a computer user’s intent to an action that the computer can perform, beginning with the search and help domain.  To do this, we utilized machine learning techniques (Naïve Bayes and Decision Tree classifiers).  I personally designed the algorithms that determine the user's intent from the data we collected, which earned me two patents. 

In this blog, I want to share my experiences as I work with cutting-edge Microsoft developer technologies.