Jason Zander's WebLog : JasonZ

Distinguished T-Shirt Engineer Best Hits

Jasonz — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 17:55:06 GMT

One of the fun things I used to do while running the CLR team was help pick out the final design for our t-shirts (not that picking out code generation strategies wasn’t also fun). Fortunately Sonja Keserovic on our team is a master at designing awesome shirts (while not doing her day job designing engines and languages). She just sent me the “best of” shirts from over the years:

“Enter the Core”

You’ll notice a big movie inspiration in the designs. The matrix style green text is actually the MSIL for “Hello World” run through ildasm. You can read through the PE file header and string table in addition to the IL instructions themselves.

“Roll Call”

Always the analytical bunch, this shirt has every email name for everyone on the team. Colors denote discipline (I’m white for ‘pointy hair’), font size denotes how long you’d been on the CLR team. The island behind the front logo is Whidbey island, the code name for V2.0.

“One Runtime to Run them All”

Around the time of LOTR, this text that makes up the ring is actually the source control root for every Microsoft project using the CLR at the time (with a nice Elvish style font).

“Don’t Panic”

The final build number for the V2.0 product was V2.0.50727.42, just around the time the Hitchhiker’s Guide movie came out. Did I mention we like geeky stuff?

Sonja is now a SDE on the languages team in VS and is creating an awesome new VS design involving pi calculus, can’t wait to see it!

New Job, New Challenges

Jasonz — Sat, 15 Sep 2007 09:08:00 GMT

Today we announced that I will be moving from the .NET team to run Visual Studio. I'm really excited about this! The VS and .NET teams are sister teams under Soma which means I will continue to work very closely with ScottGu.

The products on my team include Mobile (VSD and NETCF), Phoenix, C++, C#, VB, Javascript, the DLR (with IronRuby and IronPython), Office Tools (VSTO/VSTA), the core VS IDE platform, Popfly, and several groups doing some advanced work we aren't yet talking about (<g>). As you can imagine, there are some really phenomenal people working on these products.

VS2008 is wrapping up now and is a really great product. One of my first tasks is now to work with the team on planning the next version of VS after that. So please send me your feedback on what you'd like to see in that release!

Speaking at the Oklahoma City Code Camp

Jasonz — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 07:05:00 GMT

I will be doing the opening talk at the OKC Code Camp this Saturday. It looks like Raymond has a great agenda lined up with speakers talking about WPF, WCF, WF, Acropolis, and BizTalk. I'm going to talk a bit more about our .NET Framework roadmap, differences between WPF and Silverlight, and go through some code demos (always my favorte part of any talk).

I'm looking forward to meeting members of the .NET Users Group in person. See you Saturday!

.NET Compact Framework Perf Improvements

Anonymous — Thu, 31 Mar 2005 18:05:00 GMT

My peer on the Compact Frameworks team Mike Zintel has an interesting post about new performance improvements in version 2.0. I was at the product review and was very impressed by everything they've accomplished in V2. Mike is also an accomplished photographer. Make sure to check it out

March CTP of WinFX (Avalon, Indigo, .NET FX) now posted on MSDN

Anonymous — Wed, 16 Mar 2005 22:31:00 GMT

I'm back! I was OOF for a bit after getting pretty sick coming back from Bucharest and Tel Aviv. But I had to report that the March CTP was just posted today on MSDN. This is the first combined drop of Avalon and Indigo targeting the same CLR, as well as the first version to be dropped with SDK support. You can find the docs for the release up on MSDN as well.

This drop represents a ton of work that we started last September. Obviously the Avalon and Indigo deserve a lot of credit for this drop. But I want to make sure and congratulate the other teams that worked very hard to pull this together: the CLR team, the SDK team, the UE folks, and build and release teams (sorry if I missed anyone!). In particular, Jason Sutherland, has been kicking butt running the Tactics team. It takes a lot of folks to deliver a release like this.

Great job folks!

I got pretty sick after coming back from Romania/Israel. Being a stubborn workaholic, I actually did go to work with pneunomia. But finally had to post my OOF mail:

It seems my bronchitis has turned into pneumonia.

So why am I still doing email? Well my wife insists it’s because I’m crazy.

I prefer to think instead of my ancestors who settled Minnesota and North Dakota, building sod homes by night and planting the north 40 by day. Would pneumonia slow them down? No way! Besides, sudden rapid weight loss is quite slimming.

So I’ll be working from home doing my email, watching the next 10 lbs melt away. Worst case scenario, I’m sure Overlake Medical has added wireless to the rooms by now.

Gotta run, my wife wants to spray more Lysol on my keyboard.

[Edit: fixed the indent font thing that was messing up the rest of my page]

Headed to Romania for recruiting

Anonymous — Tue, 18 Jan 2005 16:28:00 GMT

A small group of us (from the CLR, Visual C++, and Visual Studio Team Systems teams) will be headed to Romania Jan 21 through Jan 28 to do some campus and industry recruiting.

I'm planning to attend the .NET user group at the Bucharest Microsoft offices on Jan 24 at 6 pm. The topic is Open Source Software, which should lead to an exciting discussion :-) Stop by if you are in the neighborhood.

<shameless_plug> I'm looking for experienced industry candidates who are interested in joining our main campus teams in the Developer Division. We have openings for development, test, and program management. If you are interested, send me your resume (jasonz)! </shameless_plug>

Jason Zander and Amnon Horowitz on the MSDN's The .NET Show

Anonymous — Fri, 30 Jul 2004 23:40:00 GMT

Amnon and I did the MSDN show on Whidbey. I'd like to qualify that the camera likes to add a few pounds.

I know, I know, keep your day job :-)

Welcome Jim Hugunin as the newest member of the CLR!

Anonymous — Thu, 29 Jul 2004 04:39:00 GMT

I'm back from a long vacation and very pleased that Jim has accepted my offer to join the CLR team and continue his work on dynamic langauges! I expect that he will be blogging about his work on the CLR team so you can track the progress we make on the goal. It's been great that Jim has shown you can already write a decent dynamic language on the CLR; now we can really put it in gear and add more improvements like LCG in the future to make it even better. Stay tuned to see how it turns out...

<shameless plug> If you love writing compilers and/or systems level code and would like to spend your days working with folks like Chris Brumme, Brad Abrams, Adam Nathan, and Jim, you need to check out our job listings. We're always looking for top notch devs, testers, and PM's. Even if you don't see a precise match there but you think you have what it takes, send me your resume (jasonz). As an example, I'm looking for a top notch performance architect right now (not yet listed). </>

Intro Entry

Anonymous — Wed, 17 Sep 2003 21:37:00 GMT

Look mom

Look mom, I have a blog!

A little background on myself to kick this off: I am the Product Unit Manager (PUM) of the CLR. I've been with the project since it started with some prototyping around the C++ compiler and some OOP'd extensions (remember the '98 PDC?). I was the Development Manager for V1.0 and V1.1, working for Brian Harry. Before that I worked on Visual Source Safe, the Repository, and the original ODBC team. And before that, at IBM on the AS/400 doing DRDA and SQL/400 work. Enough of that.

This site is a great source of information, and I hope you've found the contributions from the CLR team particularly helpful. Some of the documentation here (from folks like Chris, Adam, Brad, Greg, and Suzanne) is embarrassingly better than our own internal documentation on our engine! Thankfully we did the SSCLI work which also has very good documentation of our internals (it's not 100% the same code as the retail version, but is derived from it).

Please do send us feedback on additional topics you'd like to see here. If you're not sure who on the CLR, ping me and I'll give you hand.