Have blog, will travel...
My name is Jason Barile, and I'm blogging from the Research Triangle area in Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill, NC. I'm a Software Test Lead in the Visual Studio Team System group. If you haven't heard about this product yet and you're a software developer, project manager, or tester in a large development group, head over to our Microsoft.com page to learn more. (And before I forget... we're hiring!)
VSTS has several pieces: project management, bug tracking, reporting, unit and load testing... virtually something for everyone! The specific component I work on is code-named Hatteras, after a lighthouse on the North Carolina coast. We're the source-code control arm of VSTS. Several of our team members are also blogging about Hatteras: see the MS Bloggers section for links to their sites. In addition to managing day-to-day testing operations for the team, I also own some features myself (and will be blogging about them in more detail in the near future), including renaming, shadow folders, undo, working folder mappings, and labeling. Here's a demo showing some of our work in progress.
A bit of background: Before joining Microsoft, I attended college and graduate school at Vanderbilt University. While there, I worked as a research assistant in the Intelligent Robotics Lab, where among other fun projects, I helped build a theremin-playing robot. I've been a gadget-head ever since, and from time to time, you may find a couple of posts about must-have techie toys showing up here.
I joined Microsoft as an SDET in the Internet Explorer team in 1997 and haven't looked back since. Shortly after IE4 shipped (and what an amazing party that was!), I moved over to the Windows Shell team where I tested all sort of cool APIs: IActiveDesktop, Common Controls, shell extensions, shlwapi.dll, Windows XP themes, and various other shell pieces. I had the extreme fortune to work side-by-side with some great MS folks like Raymond Chen. Then, last summer, I made a big jump across the country to get back to my Southern roots & joined the Hatteras team in North Carolina.
So, there you go... just a quick introduction for now, but much more to come later. For now, I'm headed off for a week at the beach. After that, it's back to work and back to blogging!
-Jason
