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A new Opportunity for me...

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As many of you know after you ship a major release there is inevitably a re-org as the teams get in alignment to deliver on the next set of opportunities… One of the outcomes of our post-Whidbey shuffle here at Microsoft was to create a product unit that brings together our client and web frameworks and a very close connection to the WPF team with application services (such as user profiles) to deliver an awesome developer programming model experience. Specifically the team owns Windows Forms, ASP.NET, Atlas and a few other exciting incubations in this space. I have been asked to be Group Program Manager of this new team.

Having been a founding member of the CLR team, it is hard for me to think about leaving that team. The CLR is an absolutely amazing team playing a critical role at Microsoft and in the industry. This team has the extremely rare mix of being technically demanding, strategically important and staffed with smart and engaging people. Every day I have been on the CLR team I have been challenged to solve big problems, to innovate and to push harder to make a bigger impact on the company and the industry. I am extremely grateful to have “grown up” on the CLR team. (BTW – they are hiring)

Since the early days of this blog I have talked about issues I directly deal with as part of my job. Issues around API design, inner workings of the CLR and pulling WinFX together. While I am sure I will still touch on those issues (they didn’t give me a lobotomy after all) I’ll try to focus more on my new team and the new challenges we face. I hope I will not lose too many subscribers as I talk about our new innovations in the UI Frameworks and Services space.

I am sure many of you are using WinForms, WPF, ASP.NET\Atlas today – I need to get engaged with that community. Where do you suggest I hang out? What blog should I read? What are the biggest issues I should be aware of? I am spending a bunch of time ramping on this stuff, so I would appreciate all the help I can get.

Also, I am taking my first role as a manger of managers, I’d love any advice, comments, books suggestions, horror stories you’d like to share with me.

Thanks!

PS –I am lucky enough to enough to have some great folks on my team.. you may know a few of them:

https://blogs.msdn.com/dphill/.

https://blogs.msdn.com/mhendersblog

https://blogs.msdn.com/jhawk/

https://blogs.msdn.com/saurabh

Comments

  • Anonymous
    January 19, 2006
    What blog should you read? Well, mine of course.

    Although, you probably shouldn't bother if you want something on topic.

    I think basically it comes down to everyone. What's left if we aren't doing winforms or web?
  • Anonymous
    January 19, 2006
    Brad,

    So, who's going to step in as the Lead PM at CLR? Or is this what you refered as "BTW - They are hiring"?
  • Anonymous
    January 19, 2006
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    January 19, 2006
    Brad,

    Cong. on your new opportunity, and hope I can still read your wonderful posts like before.

    As to WinForms, it is not as exciting as C# or ASP.NET - it is not so innovative (lazy .NET porting of VB/Delphi controls), too hard to write professional applications (although seems has some improvement in 2.0) and does not have a clear future (aren't you replacing it with WPF or something?).
  • Anonymous
    January 19, 2006
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    January 19, 2006
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    January 19, 2006
    For WinForms try:

    http://discuss.develop.com/
    - DOTNET-WINFORMS

    &

    www.winforms.net :-)
  • Anonymous
    January 20, 2006
    Brad, does it means your job will be closely related to Windows Live experiences, Web 2.0?

    I feel you became one of top 5 people of Web 2.0 in Microsoft. Is it true?

    I am sorry I doesn't wrote #1 instead "top 5" ;-)
  • Anonymous
    January 20, 2006
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    January 23, 2006
    Congrats, sounds like a good re-org to house these teams under one roof.

    I would like to see the develop time experience for these platforms to align. The WPF experience will be lacking in the first release but I would like to see it match the level of WinForms and ASP in the future. At the same time the IDE - level Data Binding infrastructure is confusing at best. I'm talking about the interfaces that the IDE uses to navigate an object model so that developer-users can select their binding objects (IListSource, ICustomTypeDescriptor etc). It's an API for design-time usability and it needs to be fixed.

    It's going to be interesting to see how you guys market WPF to the average consumer. The experience is different and they will notice that an XBAP app is not a normal web page. If you want user level pressure for these Rich Clients then the average user needs to be able to reference the technologies.

  • Anonymous
    January 24, 2006
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    February 09, 2006
    I haven't posted in a while. This is in part due to the many changes that always happen after a product...
  • Anonymous
    July 07, 2007
    From Tuesday, March 14th, 2006: A friend of mine asked me recently if I had any good books on .NET internals...