About Bret Grinslade's WebLog
This blog is a discussion of the software ecosystem. How people, technology, and software interact to create the digital part of our lives. Evolution, revolution, rich clients, web sites, web 2.0, the internet, social computing, and on and on.
The push and pull between what users want and software can do creates an environment for business to operate and new possibilities for everyone.
A few notes about me. I got me degree in Math and found the IA part of computer science interesting. When I started my career, I started in networking support for IBM mainframe and AS400 computers and became engaged in TCPIP and the internet early on. I was amazed by the social forces at work on BBS and AOL. After starting and failing at a couple of startups around information search and OCR in 1995 (just before the bubble really got going), I started at Microsoft. I worked on the DDK and Win32 SDK for NT4 and, as a side project, produced the Inet SDK for Microsoft’s Internet Developers Conference in April of 1996.
Since then, I created the Microsoft Platform SDK for Windows 2000, worked with Sara Williams in the .NET Framework Integration team launching the .NET Framework 1.0 and spent about 8 months on the CLR team.
Today, I am the Group Program Manager at Microsft for the Deployment and Setup Technology team for Visual Studio, the .NET Framework, and WinFX Runtime components. My team is a product development team contributes to Visual Studio, SQL Server, Office, and Windows.