Amanda Silver, Paul Vick, and Erik Meijer
Carl and Richard interview three members of the Visual Basic team at PDC 2005. The conversation turns from favorite features of VB 2005 to LINQ to XML in VB.2005 to Orcas, best and worst moments on the VB team. We are also treated to a short after-dinner converation with Ted Pattison, George Bullock, Joe Hummel, and David Chappell.
Guests:
Amanda Silver
Amanda Silver is a Program Manager with the Visual Basic .NET team. As a program manager, Amanda is responsible for features including the Visual Basic compiler and language, compatibility, and performance. She has tech edited several books including Ted Pattison's Object Oriented Programming with Visual Basic .NET and the VB.NET Language printed by O'Reilly press. She is a frequent guest in live chats on MSDN and has appeared on Microsoft's VBTV. Articles by Amanda can be found in Component Developer (CoDe) magazine and she can often be found in developer forums such as VSConnections, TechEd, and at user group meetings across the country
Paul Vick
Paul Vick originally joined Microsoft as a part of the Microsoft Access group in 1992, after an internship with them the previous summer. He worked on the Access team for 4.5 years, in the process shipping versions 1.0 through 97. For the first few years, he worked on the query designer, later moving on to be a technical lead for the product and owning performance for the last two versions he worked on. Looking for a change, in 1997 he joined the Visual Basic group. For the first 1.5 years, Paul worked on adding features to the OLE Automation component that shipped with Visual Basic 6.0. After shipping VB 6.0, he moved into the core compiler team as it started work on what would become Visual Studio .NET. For a year, he worked on the code generator for the compiler until he took over the compiler team in late 1999. Along with PM, Paul drove the decision to change the language to better suit it to .NET and the CLR, helped define the new language and, for the first time, wrote a full language specification for the language. He also helped shepherd the language changes into the compiler itself and shipped Visual Basic .NET in 2002. He then become a Technical Lead in Visual Basic, continuing to work on the Visual Basic language definition and the compiler.
Erik Meijer
Erik Meijer is a technical lead in the WebData group. His alter-ego is VBTV's "Head in the Box". Before joining Microsoft, he was an associate professor at Utrecht University where he worked on advanced scripting languages such as Haskell, XMLambda, and Mondrian and directed the Microsoft lab (now defunct). He is currently working on language and type-system support for bridging the worlds of object-oriented (CLR), relational (SQL), and hierarchical (XML) data, and of course first class functions.