A brief introduction...
Eric Nelson, Developer Evangelist, Microsoft UK
I have been in Microsoft UK for over 10 years and have spent most of that time working with UK Independent Software Vendors to help them explore and adopt the latest technologies and tools from Microsoft. Along the way I have made some good friends, met some very smart people, shared very late nights in labs and lived through a variety of development technologies from the Alpha of Active Server Pages 1.0 to the betas of Microsoft Transaction Server and more recently the betas of the Microsoft .NET Framework – IMHO the best technology I have worked on – period! In 2004 and 2005 my focus was on working with ISVs on the betas of SQL Server 2005 and in 2006 I switched to Windows Vista and .NET Framework 3.0. Oh - and in case you were wondering - before joining Microsoft I was a Unix developer working exclusively in C and 4GLs writing high performance calculation engines or delivering RDBMS built on top of Sybase, Ingres and others.
Outside of work I spend most of my time with my wife, two kids, the family dog Snoop (affectionately known as "Scud" for his ability to charge into and take out any visitor to the house) and the infestation of rats that invest the old forge next door. My vice is late night gaming sessions with a great bunch of online buddies I have built up over the years from all parts of the globe - so say hi if you see "erky" or "erknel" or "Milkshake" if you share this vice - it could well be me!
So why have I created this blog? More importantly why should you read this blog? My aim is simple - to allow me to share a stream of hopefully useful thoughts and finds with the folks I spend most of my waking hours with - namely developers in the UK working within ISVs to build great solutions using our latest technologies. Given my current focus it is reasonable to expect most of what you will find here during 2006/2007 will be in someway related to Windows Vista and .NET Framework development. You may also find the occasional post on my after 10pm hobby - online gaming - just skip those :-)
Thanks for reading….
