Alright, I'm going to try to recommit myself to actually adding some value to blogland. We'll see how it goes.
In case you don't otherwise know, I'm the Development Manager for the .NET Client Team at Microsoft. I'm blessed to work have such a kick-ass team, with people like Brian, JFo, Soak, Ben, Julien, and Raghav. We own Windows Forms and the Windows Forms Designer in VS.Net as well as some of the plumbing other designers use.
So I'm having a meeting today with Raghav, and he asks me what my story is with my blog. I confess to him that basically I can't think of things to write about on a day to day basis. I'm not super-involved with the coding stuff that he and others write about all the time, so that's not the best thing for me. And what I do think about every day doesn't seem incredibly interesting. But he pointed out it's amazing what people are interested in on the Internet, which is a good point so maybe I can give it another shot, and focus on my life here at MS what keeps me spinning on a day-to-day basis. Now, I didn't promise it would be all that interesting, but we'll see.
Title Soup. It can be hard to make sense of how things are organized here at MS. It's pretty obvious what testers do, and what developers do, no one is really sure what Program Managers (PMs) do. :) The way that we are organized is into something called Product Units (PU). A PU, as you might guess, is generally focused around a particular...wait for it....yes product. But for large products like Windows or VS it's really a bunch of other smaller PUs. There is a PU for ASP.NET, Visual C#, MSN Messenger, Visio, Excel, UltimateTV, XBox, you get the picture. Some of those might be a collection of PUs actually, I don't know. Annnyway, a PU is run by a Product Unit Manager (PUM, prounced 'puhm'), and is made up primarily of three groups of people: Testers, Program Managers, and Developers. Those organizations are run by people who report directly to the PUM, that being the Test Manager, the Group Program Manager (GPM) and Development Manager (Dev Manager). So in my case, all those great folks I listed above are the ones who do the real work around here and report up through me (except, until recently, Brian).
Make sense?