Another reason to attend your local Microsoft Usergroup – getting to meet the Visual Studio Product Team!

Visual Studio Product Tour comes to Philly

As part of the recent launch for Visual Studio 2010 the Visual Studio Team is going out on tour to visit local usergroups and customers.  We were lucky enough to have Scott Wiltamuth, Product Unit Manager for Visual Studio Languages, visit Philly.NET Monday night to give an overview of what is new in Visual Studio 2010.  He also took open Q&A from an audience of over 120.  You can check out photos from the event here.

It is so exciting as a developer when you get to meet people who wrote the product you use everyday.  Scott runs a team of around 100 developers and has had a long history with Microsoft coming into his 17th year.  His team is currently responsible for the .NET programming languages: VB, C#, F#, IronPython and IronRuby. 

  

Scott was also gracious enough to do an hour long Q&A and shared insight into his career at Microsoft.  Starting all the way back in the QBasic days, though what it was like being on the Visual Basic 1.0 team and creating VBScript/JScript.  

Having started my professional career on Visual Basic 5 and ASP it was awesome to get a behind the scenes point of view of those early days of the Internet and the way design decisions were made.  Thank you Scott!

The best swag ever?

In a rare opportunity Scott also offered to have both himself and Anders Hejlsberg sign their latest C# Programming book . Four lucky winners took home this prize and will be getting their signed books in the following weeks!

 

More Visual Studio Team coming

 

Did you miss Monday night?  No worries!  In June two members of Scott’s team will also be visiting Philly.NET again and covering both C# and VB.NET.  Stay tuned to the Philly.Net website and my Twitter feed for updates of when registration will open.

You can also sign up for the official Visual Studio Launches coming to our area I mentioned here.

-Dave