Hi all, here’s a crack at the customary first blog entry.

My name is Raj, and I am the Group Program Manager (GPM) of the Visual C# team.  In a nutshell this means that I manage the team of PMs that drive the design and development of the C# IDE, C# language/compiler, and the Visual Studio Debugger.  If people are interested, I’d love to talk more in future posts about what PMs do at Microsoft and specifically on the Visual C# team.

I had my start with Microsoft as an intern with the Visual J++ team in 1997, but joined the MSN Hotmail team as a PM out of school (Stanford, BS in Computer Science).  I spent 5 years on the Hotmail team before moving last year from sunny California to rainy Redmond, WA with my wife and new baby boy.  We love it up here – it’s a great place to raise a family.

I love my job – I’m super passionate about the developer experience.  I feel like we have a lot of opportunities at Microsoft to help influence the entire industry by making writing code more enjoyable and more productive.  If you’ve had a chance to play with any of the Visual Studio 2005 (Whidbey) betas, I’d love to get your feedback!  If you haven’t, you may want to check out our lightweight C# Express beta (more on this at LukeH’s blog).

On a personal note, I spend nearly all my free time nowadays with our 14 month old baby.  While I haven’t had much of a chance lately, I also like to read and travel.