New member of the Open XML team: Eric White

I recently mentioned that I've moved to a new role in the Office organization, and now that my replacement over in DPE is officially signed, sealed, and soon to be delivered, I just wanted to mention how excited I am about the latest addition to the Open XML team here at Microsoft.

Eric White is the new Open XML technical evangelist, and he brings a wealth of XML development experience to the role. He's the guy who wrote all of the Linq to XML samples for MSDN, which happen to use Open XML documents as their inputs. (An early sign of Eric's natural fit for the role he's taking on. :-))

If you're not familiar with Linq technology, it's something worth checking out carefully. The code is terse and simple, and extremely powerful. It's also structured in a way that makes it easy to take advantage of parallel processing architectures, and that's something that will be a bigger and bigger factor in the years ahead. Eric will be helping Open XML developers take advantage of tools like Linq to build sophisticated and powerful Open XML implementations quickly, and you can get a head start on learning Linq over on Eric's blog, where he has posted many samples and well-written explanations of the core concepts.

Eric has been working with XML development technologies since long before Linq came along in C# 3.0. He's the founder of PowerVista Software, and has written books on hard-core development topics including .NET Graphics Programming and GDI+ Programming. He's also an enthusiastic and high-energy guy, and I'm really looking forward to seeing what kind of Open XML content he starts cranking out in his new role. Eric just finished reading the Primer (Part 3) of the Open XML spec, and I know he has a bunch of ideas about cool samples and demos for Open XML developers. He'll be officially in the new role at the end of the year, so watch for some great Open XML content from him in 2008 on his blog, OpenXMLDeveloper, and other places.  Eric has a lot to teach all of us about how to take Open XML development to new levels.

Welcome to the team, Eric!