Hello, there!  I work out of Microsoft's India Development Center at Hyderabad, India.  I am the Director of the Developer Tools group, which is part of the Developer Division, home to Visual Studio and the .NET framework.  I moved back to India after a long stint in Redmond, for family reasons, in 2001.  Although most of my career at Microsoft has been on operating systems, I took the plunge into the developer tools arena in late 2002.  I should confide that I was nervous about a large change like this, but I have been having a ton of fun.

My original responsibility in the Developer world was to manage the Visual J# effort.  You may know that Visual J#, that ships as one of the 4 languages with Visual Studio, was built from scratch out of Microsoft's India Development Center.  Visual J# is a tool that Java-language programmers can use to build applications and services to run on the .NET Framework. Visual J# targets the common language runtime and can be used to develop .NET applications, including XML Web services and Web applications, making full use of the .NET Framework  In addition to Visual J#, I also own the Java Language Conversion Assistant tool, that also ships as part of Visual Studio.  This tool helps convert Java applications to C# and .NET.

A big part of my charter now includes components that ship as part of the new Visual Studio Team System (VSTS).  VSTS will make its debut with Visual Studio 2005 later this year.  My team is building some key technologies that ship with the server components of VSTS (called the Team Foundation Server).  Team Build, which is basically a "Build in a Box" is one of the significant pieces that we are creating out of my team.  The intent of Team Build is to help customers establish a build lab without going through the process of writing a bunch of custom scripts.  A lot of information gets generated as part of the build process that touches all the different tools we are providing.  The intent is to unite all the components to add value to the suite.  We are also building conversion tools to migrate existing source code and work item tracking software to the new generation source code control system and work item tracking software that ship with VSTS. 

Overall, I am super excited to be part of the effort to build cool technologies that reach out and benefit millions of developers, testers, project managers and architects, worldwide.