Yag moves on and stays at the same time (by yag)
As many of you know, after a major release, people at Microsoft tend to look around to see what they’d like to work on next. After working on two releases of Visual Studio and a similar number of releases of Visual FoxPro, I’ve accepted a position in Microsoft.com as an architect focusing on our community products.
I accepted this position because it marries the community issues that I’m so passionate about, with the ability to quickly and immediately touch our customers around the world. In essence, I will be responsible for a multi-release plan developing a platform that includes the following:
a. blogs.msdn.com,
c. on-line chats,
d. CodeZone search,
e. GotDotNet
f. and others…
We want to turn this into a platform that every division in Microsoft can use to quickly build their own unique community presence and push that presence out to their partners in the community.
Given that this involves architecture, cross-division impact and customer presence, I just couldn’t say no. It’s been an amazing four years here in DevDiv – getting to work on multiple releases of VB, Data Tools and VFP.
In Visual Studio 2005 we made data easier to work with, something we’ll be improving in Orcas. We’ve also got LINQ coming down the pike – deeply integrating querying and data capabilities into VB and C# - something that I think will quickly become a capability that is considered a “must have” for any general purpose programming languages. Now I look forward to helping build tools that make it easier for everyone to work more closely with our customers.
In Visual FoxPro, we’ve revamped the report writer, improved its extensibility and deepened its integration with SQL Server and .NET.
Speaking of Visual FoxPro, the folks at MSCOM have been good enough to let me continue to drive that forward as we work on Sedna. So, I’ll still be the person responsible for VFP, working with Calvin, Milind and the rest of the team. As you can see, I’ll still have one foot in DevDiv. <g> However, I don’t feel right posting to the VS Data blog, so I’ve created a new one here (where I'll be cross-posting this). Come by for more details on the new position, Visual FoxPro, life, the universe and everything. Note that VFP is staying in the Data Team, so Milind (and any others who want to) will continue blogging here. I just think it’s time I get a personal blog – like Ken and Calvin.
One last note to the VS Data team: you all rock – I know you’re working on some amazing things for the future. I look forward to working with it all in my new role.