Introducing the Visual Studio ALM Rangers – Alan Wills

This post is part of an ongoing series of Rangers introductions. See An index to all Rangers covered on this blog for more details.

Who you are?

Alan Cameron Wills – senior programming writer, working on Visual Studio modeling tools. I work from home in the UK (8 hours ahead – call before midday if you’re on the Pacific coast!) Mostly, I write MSDN library content. Before I was a writer, I worked on DSL Tools; and before I joined MS in 2003, I was a methods and UML consultant.

What makes you “tick”?

I like explaining stuff – I like my job because it’s all about that. But explanation is a dialog. You can’t know what to say unless you know where your audience is coming from, and know where they want to go. I need to know what our users actually do with the tools and what they find important. And I don’t want to waste their time with stuff they don’t care about or already know or can work out from the tools.

Where do you live?

United Kingdom (UK)

Where is the place you call home?

UK … PDT + 8 hours :)

Why are you active in the Rangers program?

So for me, the Rangers is a good two-way channel. It helps me ground what I’m writing in real projects and the experience of our Most Valued Professionals.

What is the best Rangers project you worked in and why?

The ALM tools guidance project was good to be involved in – co-authoring with MVPs as well as MS people.