Fabulous Adventures In Coding : Introduction

Fabulous Adventures in C# and VSTO

Eric Lippert — Fri, 19 Aug 2005 13:00:00 GMT

I am incredibly excited, but a little sad too.

1295 days ago I attended a rather hastily-called meeting in which the senior management of the Visual Studio team announced that the Microsoft Office Developer, VBA and Scripting teams would be reorganized into a new team dedicated to the proposition that professional developers who use Office in their solutions could benefit greatly from a more modern, integrated, managed-code-based approach to development.

This was a huge challenge, and very exciting. Over the last 1295 days of design, implementation, testing, usability studies, customer visits, documentation, and everything else, I've seen Visual Studio Tools for Office go from a vague mission statement to actual shippable software that meets real customer needs. I've learned a tremendous amount from my coworkers and customers, and I'm very proud to have played a small part in getting VSTO ready to go when Whidbey ships.

But... as readers of this blog may have guessed, I really, really love programming languages. Some of my old colleagues from Scripting now work in the C# team and were good enough to offer me a job working on the guts of the C# 3.0 compiler, which, after long and difficult thought, I've accepted.

I'm sad to leave the VSTO team -- they're a heck of a fun bunch of people to work with, and we're just getting started in our mission to revitalize the rich client. But the chance to work on the incredibly awesomely cool features that are coming up in C# 3.0 was too good to pass up. I'm totally excited about this opportunity. (I can't really talk about these new features yet because I don't want to spoil the surprise. Go to Anders' talk at the PDC in September if you're curious! Anders was kind enough to give me a personal preview of the new stuff and he's just infectiously enthusiastic about them.)

Of course, this doesn't mean that I'm going to stop talking about VBScript and JScript any time soon. But I have a feeling that this blog may take a turn towards some of the theory and practice behind the design and implementation of really huge modern compiled languages.

Finally, the VSTO team is going to need someone to move into my old office. They're a great bunch of people -- smart, fun, innovative -- who solve complex and interesting problems. If you love building tools for other pro devs and you are a strong C++/C#/COM programmer, go read this posting by my friend, coauthor and erstwhile lead Eric Carter.

Can you fix my computer?

Eric Lippert — Wed, 14 Jan 2004 02:23:00 GMT

Joe Bork comments on things people ask when they find out you work for Microsoft. Me, I get the same three over and over.

1)     Are you a millionaire? (This one crops up less often since the dot com bust.)
2)     Do you know Bill Gates?
3)     Can you fix my computer?

For the record, the answers are

(1) not yet, and based on how much that kitchen remodel cost, not likely for some time,
(2) I've spoken to Bill once, in 1994, as an intern, at a party. I asked him what he thought about Linux, which was less of a big deal back then. I'll avoid getting slashdotted by not passing along his comments at this time.
(3) very, very unlikely. I live with a bunch of people with MCE certs for a reason. I'm hopeless at anything other than language design.

Welcome to blogs.msdn.com.

Eric Lippert — Fri, 09 Jan 2004 19:00:00 GMT

I'm pleased to announce that the good people at MSDN and the good people at ASP.net have worked together to set up a special site for Microsoft bloggers like myself. http://blogs.msdn.com is a new site hosted by http://weblogs.asp.net. (Either prefix will work for this blog, so don't feel like you've got to go changing your links again.)

I'm still hoping to get the previous blog (http://blogs.gotdotnet.com/ericli) redirected here and have the existing content moved over. More on that as it happens.

[UPDATE] As you can see, all the content has been moved over (though some of it has some minor formatting problems on some displays.) Excellent!

Many thanks to everyone who made this happen -- I am very glad to not have to deal with the necessary Internet plumbing myself!

Once More Into The Breach

Eric Lippert — Thu, 11 Dec 2003 22:05:00 GMT

This is the new home of Eric Lippert's Fabulous Adventures In Coding. Eventually the content from http://blogs.gotdotnet.com/ericli will be moved over here

The Most Boring Story Ever

Eric Lippert — Mon, 27 Oct 2003 20:11:00 GMT

The other day a reader suggested:

Make a blogentry about how you started at MS and so on!

You asked, but I'm warning you: it's the most boring story ever.

I grew up in Waterloo , Ontario , which was a piece of luck as Waterloo has the best computer science school in Canada . I studied applied mathematics and computer science (along with my close personal friends and fellow bloggers Dr. Orbifold and Dr. Thingo) from 1991 to 1996. Amongst its many claims to fame, UW has the largest cooperative education program on the planet. For my fourth, fifth and sixth work terms I was an intern on the VBA team here at Microsoft. On the strength of my internship the VBA team extended me a job offer, which I accepted. I worked full-time on the scripting technology for five years.

Then the VBA, Scripting and Microsoft Office Developer teams were reorganized into one large team (the "Trinity" team) tasked with modernizing and improving the Office developer story. I've been working on that for about two years now. We've just shipped "Microsoft Visual Studio .NET Tools For The Microsoft Office System 2003", which I actually did very little work on -- that was Peter Torr 's baby, so read his blog if you want details. I've been working on the next version, which, of course, I can't talk about except to say that I hope the name is shorter. Also, I do a fair amount of work still on scripting -- not implementing new features of course, but ongoing work like attending security reviews, helping out our product support and sustaining engineering teams, and (obviously) writing a blog.