This week you can watch the first in a series of videos featuring members of the Microsoft C# team. A video of Raj Pai, the Group Program Manager for the C# team, leads off the series. Raj understands how the team is structured, and can give you an overview of life here at C# central. A perfect first subject, Raj is both articulate and an important member of the team.

The main goals of this video project will be two fold:

1. To deliver lots of good technical content.
2. To give you a window onto life here on the C# team. 

As time goes on, I want to work my way through as many team members as possible, including a good portion of the developer and QA staff. Naturally, most of the interviews will be technical, and will feature previews of new features or insights into existing features.

Link to the video: http://wm.microsoft.com/ms/msdn/visualcsharp/pm_raj/pm_raj_02.wmv

Microsoft Development News and Tools

• Microsoft recently bought Sysinternals. Go here to see a great video of Scott Hanselman talking about some of the Sysinternals free downloads. If you don’t already use this software, then watch this video, it will change your life!
• Here is a set of more professional videos on the Sysinternals tools.
• Here is a list of some web specifications, such as SOAP and WSDL, that Microsoft has published or helped define.
• Fellow PM Scott Nonnenberg introduced me to another recent Microsoft acquisition, called FolderShare. You can use the beta of this tool to sync two or more directory trees on different machines. It is remarkably intelligent, and works more smoothly and efficiently than I had dared hope. I’m not quite sure how I lived without it.
• There is an interesting video of Sara Ford talking about the most recent Open Source Convention (OSCON). Sara works on the floor above the C# group, and is an important source of information on CodePlex.

What’s Hot from the C# Team

• Anson Horton has another great post, this time on C# XML Documentation. The title of his article might not seem very compelling, but I found Anson’s text was full of useful information. I meant to just glance at the article, but he hooked me right in the first paragraph and I happily plowed on through to the end.
• The blog of talented C# team member Matt Warren sputtered back to life today. It is worthwhile scrolling through his entries to find the good technical information he has published over the last few months.
• I’ve been getting up to speed on the Microsoft C# QA team. There is a lot of terminology to learn, and I found this post by QA Test Manager Rusty Miller to be helpful.
• A month or so ago our resident database expert on the PM team, Dinesh Kulkarni, offered some tips on using LINQ.
• Another team member, Mads Torgersen, is threatening to crank up his blog.

A Series of .NET Framework White papers

David Chappell has been working on a series of articles about upcoming .NET technologies. 

• The most recent in the series covers the Windows Presentation Foundation. The WPF is often referred to by its codename, which is Avalon.
• Here is a valuable overview of the upcoming .NET Framework 3.0.
• Tired of keeping track of all those passwords? CardSpace is designed to solve the problem for you.
• In my last job at Falafel Software, we often talked about the Windows Workflow Foundation. David Chappell has written a good overview of that topic.

That’s all I’m going to write today. In the coming weeks, I plan to continue making videos of C# team members, and I will continue searching for technical content both inside Microsoft, and out on the net.