Moving over to a new blog... And something about me

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Moving over my blog from sqljunkies. At sqljunkies I had made a start with some background articles about SQL Server Management Objects and I have a whole bunch of articles lined up for this blog.

 

A quick introduction --

 

I moved from The Netherlands to the U.S. and started working for Microsoft about 3 1/2 years ago. Before this I had worked as Principal Architect for a large ERP company, responsible for the architecture of Development Tools and Runtime. In '99 I attended an (mostly) academic Lab organized by the .NET Framework/CLR team on a very early versions of the C#, the CLR and the .NET Framework in order to see whether we could move our language and application over to the CLR. We had developed our own Language/Runtime in the late 80's which looked very similar to .NET Runtime, it being slightly different as it runs always interpreted code -- JIT compilation was out of the question if you have to support more than 10000 applications on 30+ platforms -- you will be surprised how unreliable certain compilers are if throw enough code at them and this would blow the test matrix out of the water, not thinking about the possible support nightmare this would be as well.

 

At the Lab I was intrigued by the vision that Microsoft had by developing a language and platform independent runtime (which we had reaped the benefits of for already 10 years) and in 2000 I decided it was time to move to a new challenge and Microsoft had moved to the top of my list before ABN-AMRO which offered be a job as Architect, and another offer to become CTO for an Internet startup (bricks and clicks type). The choice for Microsoft was easily made, and after being grilled by the interviewers, I received an offer to go work with the SQL Server team (to be frank I thought I flunked the interview which I've heard is not an uncommon reaction after being hammered to bits for a full day). It's been a dream come true and a fun ride. SQL Server is an amazing product built by an amazing set of people and I'm pretty happy that I can be a part of such a major release as Yukon.... My team is SQL Server Tools -- see also Euan Garden's blog.

 

Well, that all for now. Wishing you all happy holidays and a good 2005 (which is going to be an exciting year for the SQL Server team as well :-)

 

If anyone wants to say hi, please do.