A world of opportunities!

As we head into the holidays, I wanted to take a moment to reflect what we have accomplished this past year and my excitement moving forward.

Without a doubt, the release of Visual Studio 2005 and the .NET Framework 2.0 was our biggest accomplishment this year. The excitement generated by this product launch is unprecedented. In the 4 short years since we launched .NET, we have become the #1 trusted platform for customers to run their mission critical systems, with virtually every company in Global 1000 building on .NET. Another big highlight of the year was the huge developer excitement that we saw at the PDC 2005 with Atlas, VSTA, IIS 7.0, LINQ, and our Expression Suite of products. We have an excellent partner ecosystem for Visual Studio.

I also want to take this opportunity to say a big “thank you” to the community and our customers and partners. You have been an invaluable partner in giving us feedback, in helping us build and deliver the right products and infusing us with your enthusiasm, energy and excitement at the launch and other events. Thank you!

Looking forward, I am excited about the opportunities ahead of us - our entry in the software development lifecycle space, the kinds of development experiences that we can enable on the client, the Expression products under development that will enable seamless designer developer workflows, continued innovation work in languages, the strides we are making in application customization, the rich partner ecosystem and our Express editions of Visual Studio and the broad reach we are seeing in the hobbyist and academic community for the same. I see opportunities, opportunities and more opportunities!

I wish you all a great Holiday season and a Happy New Year.

Namaste!