A new job for me, better products for you

bgold — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 19:40:58 GMT

And hopefully some more time to blog :) This week we re-organized our team so that we could better serve the needs of our internal and external partners and customers. I won't bore you with the details but it has a pretty major impact on what I do and the kinds of information I want; so I figured this was a great opportunity to share.

My new job is focused on Developer Division (which includes designers) Platform Strategy. My new team is 100% focused on making sure we build the best possible products for the market place. We get to understand the trends, the big picture, the little picture, customer needs, partner needs, and partner deeply with the engineering teams run by Scott Guthrie (NDP) and Eric Zocher (Designer) to help ensure that the products we build work great together and address the key needs of the market today, tomorrow, and way into the future.

Sounds like a huge daunting challenge, but gurantee it is going to be a lot of fun. To date, I've spent some of my time on this, but we've decided it is so critical that me and my team get to spend 100% of our time focused here. The results, well you'll be able to tell me as we lead up to MIX, PDC, and the next rev's of our products.

My team looks after the following technologies -- so take a look and lay it on, good, bad, ugly. What you want, what you don't want, what you don't even think you want, anything that you think will help us.

Tools

Expression Studio (Blend, Media, Web, Design) + futures
Visual Web Developer (the Web tooling inside Visual Studio)
"Cider" (the WPF tooling for VS) + futures

Platforms

ASP.NET
WPF
"WPF/E"
AJAX
Internet Explorer
Commerce Server

Plus the broader marketplace that encompasses these technologies (Web 2.0, UX, etc.)

I'll still be posting as much useful info as I can around the outbound work that we do, but my energy is going to be focused on building amazing products. Spread the word, we want your feedback.

Oh and joining me on the team are:

Brad Becker looking after Rich Client Platform and Tools

Sanjoy Sarkar looking after Web Platform

Pete LePage looking after IE, Web Tooling, Standards

Max Akbar looking after Commerce Server

and we are hiring a few positions

1) Expression Media and Media Workflow strategy

2) Rich Client Platform - Developer strategy

3) Rich Client Platform - Designer strategy

I'll associate JD's once we write them ;)

See a demo of"Crossbow" - Windows Forms and Windows Presentation Foundation Interoperability

bgold — Mon, 20 Feb 2006 19:01:00 GMT

In November, I took on a new role as the Lead Product Manager for the Client/Web Platform and Tools team. This is a new charter for our group and it mirrors the charter that Scott Guthrie's new organization is responsible for. One of the product units we look after is called UIFx which incorproates both the ASP.NET framework team and the Windows Form framework team. Together, they are going to be able to build an amazing set of integrated framework technologies for delivering technologies both in the browser and on the desktop.

One of the cool incubation projects in the team is a project codenamed "Crossbow," which is a set of technology to enable WinForms and WPF interop -- or the ability to easily integrate WPF based components into tradition, WinForms based Smart Client applications -- this enables developers to easily add even richer UI to existing WinForms investments and help simplify integrating WPF investments into existing applications.

Mike Henderlight, one of the PM's on CrossBow recently did an awesome MSDN TV episode focused on "CrossBow" -- you should check it out here

http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdntv/episode.aspx?xml=episodes/en/20060216CrossbowMH/manifest.xml

Let us know your thoughts!

Brian Goldfarb's Blog : WinForms

A new job for me, better products for you

See a demo of"Crossbow" - Windows Forms and Windows Presentation Foundation Interoperability