Hello blogging world!

My name is Tom Archer and I’ve joined Microsoft as a Program Manager for the MSDN Online team.  This is my first blog-entry so I thought I’d introduce myself and give a bit of background about me and what I’ll be doing here at Microsoft.

Some of you might know me from my various books (such as Inside C#, Visual C++.NET Bible, Extending MFC Applications with the .NET Framework and so on). I’ve also authored over a hundred online articles and frequently help other developers in various Internet forums.

In addition to my writing, I’ve been designing and developing software for over 20 years on many different operating systems and programming languages. My main languages are C++ and C# so you can expect that most articles written by me will be done using one of these two languages.

As you probably know, MSDN supports the various Microsoft products and technologies via “Developer Centers” – a logical grouping of Web pages on the MSDN site where you can view and download products, documentation, samples, tutorials, articles, etc. for a given technology (or group of semantically-related technologies).

Currently, I’m responsible for the Windows Vista developer center. Being both a C++ and C# developer will enable me to provide valuable information for those of you writing native (non-.NET) code as well as managed (.NET) code. While I’ll go into more details in future articles and blog entries, my current goal is to publish articles, samples and tutorials on such topics as Vista internals, security, writing native 64-bit code, programming the new Windows Presentation Foundation – formerly known as Avalon, using the XAML declarative language and so on.

Keep in mind that all of us here at MSDN publish content to better support our products and to help make you – the developers and managers – more productive. Therefore, if there’s something specific about Vista (or its related technologies) that you’d to learn more about, then feel free to drop me a line!