Introduction The time that I spent working at Microsoft was an unexpectedly transforming experience. The first half of my career regularly put me and the companies I worked with in competition with Microsoft, and I was often surrounded by anti-Microsoft stories and propaganda. However, when I heard about . NET, I decided I wanted to know more and that the best way to do that was to learn at the source. As I got into the technology and the company, what I found was more than a little surprising. The . NET Framework, the C# language, ASP. NET, and SQL Server are sophisticated and technically beautiful achievements. After working with Java for several years, which also has a definite elegance, it was refreshing and empowering to use a well-integrated platform, where everything (mostly) worked together seamlessly. At a technical level, I found that I usually agreed with the decisions and tradeoffs the platform developers made, and that the resulting system helped to substantially improve my productivity as a developer. I also found the Microsoft engineering teams to be wonderfully bright, creative, and–perhaps most surprising of all to me as a former outsider–sincerely interested in solving customer problems. My enthusiasm for the technology helped carry me into a customer-facing position as a solutions architect at the Microsoft Technology Center in Silicon Valley. Being exposed in-depth to customer issues was another eye-opening experience.
