Greetings from the New Girl [Melitta Andersen]

My name is Melitta Andersen, and I started at Microsoft last Monday as a PM in the BCL. I was an intern here last year, and then went back to Carnegie Mellon to finish my CS degree. Since my return to the BCL, I’ve discovered that this blog is a useful tool for getting caught up on what my team has been doing. So I decided to introduce myself to the other people who use it.

It looks like the areas I’ll be working on are System.Resources, System.Globalization, System.Text, and System.*, although things haven’t been set in stone yet. That’s a lot of material to learn, so if there’s anything in those areas that you want to call to my attention, please do. I have one other area that I’m working on, though I don’t know that it falls neatly into a namespace yet. When I was here last summer, my intern project could roughly be described as “do something with numbers,” and I’ll probably be working on numeric things again.

I seem to have picked an exciting time to start, and I’m looking forward to contributing in any way I can.

Thanks,
Melitta

Comments

• Anonymous
  August 13, 2007
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  August 13, 2007
  It would be nice if Microsoft at least pretended to care about people doing scientific work. Without support for even the basics like standard conversion functions, complex numbers, and vectors, it is a real pain to get anything done. Either you have to roll your own math libraries or try out countless 3rd party offerings.

• Anonymous
  August 14, 2007
  Hello Melitta! My friend told me BigInteger wouldn't be in release. Is he right? We are got stuck with olympiad coding (ACM, Topcoder, etc) and lack of stadard BigInteger/BigDecimal/PriorityQueue/(standard algorithms and data structures) is really pity. Happy to hear anything about them all!

• Anonymous
  August 14, 2007
  First off, thanks for the feedback.  I was guessing that as soon as I mentioned numbers I'd get at least a couple of comments. Luciano, thanks for the warm welcome. Grauenwolf, I agree that it would be nice if the CLR offered more mathematical support.  That's one of the reasons I'm on number stuff.  I'm going to be investigating over the next few weeks to see what we can do, but I can't make any promises.  Thanks for offering some examples of things you want.  It would be useful if I knew what aspects were most important to you.  Performance, certain APIs, etc. Vadim, your friend is correct.  BigInteger will not be in this release, nor will BigDecimal.  I haven’t looked into PriorityQueue.  BigInteger was in the original plan, but we had performance and compatibility issues that couldn’t be resolved in time.  What kinds of things do you need them for in your olympiad coding? I don’t know how soon I’ll have more information on number stuff, but when I have something I can tell you, I’ll post about it. Thanks, Melitta

• Anonymous
  August 16, 2007
  Welcome, and many thanks for the news about math support! What is the preferred feedback channel for an hypothetic future implementation of BigInteger?

• Anonymous
  August 17, 2007
  Lionel, thanks for the welcome and for the excellent question.  I had to go ask about the answer myself.  The preferred method of feedback is Microsoft Connect at http://connect.microsoft.com/intro.aspx.  The particular Visual Studio and .NET Framework page is at  http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio.  Going through this channel makes sure we can actually use your feedback. Thanks, Melitta

• Anonymous
  August 29, 2007
  Thank you very much for asking and for the answer. I have posted a suggestion (bug ID 295714) on Connect.

• Anonymous
  August 30, 2007
  Thanks for sending in your feedback.  I've read it, and I think it's going to be really useful.  I'll keep you updated on progress.

• Anonymous
  September 11, 2007
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  January 04, 2008
  This has been the subject of several recent feedback e-mails we’ve received. Moreover, a few recent correspondents