About Me
My name is Jeremy Morton; I have been working at Microsoft for nearly 7 years [for nearly 2 years as a contractor, and as an employee for the last 5]. Currently, I am an SDET [Software Design Engineer in Test] for an internal server product, but most of my career here has been as a Builder1, first in WMI [as part of Systems Management Server then as part of Windows], and then in the Developer Division, first building the .NET Development Platform then Visual Studio.
After Windows 2000 shipped, I worked to make WMI build in the Windows build environment. I then worked in one of the Windows Build Labs for a few months until I was hired full time in the Developer Division in April, 2000. In the Developer Division, besides my build duties, I started managing the server [for the product I now test] for the NDP team. As Visual Studio .NET [7.0] shipped and we were working on Visual Studio .NET 2003 [7.1], I was part of the Build Working Group that set up the development process for the next version of Visual Studio, which was based on the Windows process. Besides being a builder, I was the principle administrator for the server [for the product I now test] for the entire Developer Division until Fall of 2004, when I became an SDET on my current team.
During this time, I have worked a lot with the Windows OS, both on the client and server side, and have gotten a lot of experience with building and using the Windows Command Prompt for scripting. [Contrary to a lot of people's misconceptions, on Windows 2000 and up, the command prompt can be a very powerful scripting shell, although it definitely has weaknesses in some areas such as string manipulation.] I intend to pass on some of the things that I've learned about using Windows and building through this blog. I also use a fairly diverse set of Microsoft products at home, and I may comment on them here, as well. I tend to work best when I'm answering specific questions, so I'd love to get questions related to these things. However, I do not intend to discuss the product that I currently work on.
1Builders regularly [often daily] take the source code checked into the Source Control System by Developers and compile them into the product as distributed to customers. The Testers then take this and test it, reporting bugs for developers to fix and check in, etc. A build team is usually much smaller than the Developer or Test teams, often by a couple of orders of magnitude. There are many different things that need to be done to build a product, including compiling, code-signing, propagating to a build server in a logical manner, maintaining debug symbols, building cab files/setup files/cd images, and a lot of other miscellaneous steps. Because of the variety, it offers a wide variety of problems to solve daily. Due to the high turnaround rate for builds, it is often a high stress, tight deadline team where bottlenecks can stall an entire Division. I loved it. :)
