5 Years At Microsoft

  • Article

Microsoft 5 Year Service Award Five years ago today I walked into Microsoft building 41 as green as the first day of college.  This entire time I’ve been in the Developer Division with the pleasure to work on improving some of the best software development tools in the industry.  The first 3.5 years were in Visual Studio Team System and the last year and a half have been on the core Visual Studio platform team.  I’m now working on shipping my third version of Visual Studio and have worked as a Program Manager on a number of interesting projects, including…

  • Visual Studio Team System (VSTS)
  • Visual Studio Debugger
  • Visual Studio Unit Testing
  • VSTS Process Guidance
  • VSTS Training Materials
  • Release Management
  • WPF based VS Shell for VS 2010
  • WPF Start Page for VS 2010
  • xcopy deployable VS we’re using for internal tooling
  • VS Setup improvements in performance and ease
  • VS Express product line ownership
  • improvements to VS core assets such as the Toolbox, Error List, Output Window, etc

These projects have included your typical corporate software development tasks as a Program Manager, such as team coordination, resource scheduling, writing specifications, strategic planning, countless demos, internal reporting, asset organization, competitive analysis, bug triaging, collecting customer feedback, documenting, blogging, internal corporate evangelism, training, providing support, design reviews, involving key customers (eg, MVPs), event planning, creating samples, college recruiting, new hire interviewing, providing field support, presenting at conferences, and a little coding here and there.

(pictured is the MS 5-yr service award)