Sunday, April 4, 2010

I’ve left the Silverlight team

I recently left the Silverlight team.  Silverlight is a great team to work for and I have tremendous confidence in the continued success of the product.  However at this point in my career platform development doesn’t appeal to me very much. I’d rather be much higher up in the stack working on user-facing technology.  To that end I’ve joined a research team that’s developing semantic web technology for Bing (among other things).

Unfortunately this will mean that I won’t be able to blog as much about what I’m doing because most of my work will be under NDA.  I can say that it is very exciting though!  If there’s one thing Microsoft does better than anyone it’s funding and productizing research (although there’s still room for improvement).

Working for the Silverlight team has been a real thrill.  It was great to be able to fight for and contribute features to the platform that I cared about. I’m proud to have been a part of Silverlight 4 and I can’t wait to use it on my new team.

5 comments:

Judah Gabriel Himango said...

Well, I said some time ago you ought to be in research, maybe language research. I think you've made a step in the right direction.

Jafar Husain said...

Thanks for the well-wishes. It's funny you should mention because shortly after I joined my current team a position became available on the C# team.

However even if the position had come up earlier I don't think I would've pursued it. Working on C# would've been incredibly rewarding but frankly I don't think I've got the chops for it. I'll leave that difficult work to the Erik Meijer's, Wes Dyer's, and Anders of the world.

Unknown said...

Thanks for the heads up! I really enjoy developing for Silverlight (I hope they'll let me use 4 soon) and appreciate your efforts in the technology. I hope you can help improve Bing! Microsoft usually gets a bad rep when it comes to showing new things although their tech is still #1.

Cheers,

Joe

Unknown said...

Damn... and with so much left to be said about Silverlight drag and drop! Is there anyone else taking over blogging about it?

Jafar Husain said...

Not really. My apologies to the community. I've been neglecting my responsibility to blog more deeply about this technology (as evidenced by the fact that the blog posts I've made are overflowing with questions). I'm trying to find some time to expand but my new job is taking up a tremendous amount of my time. I promise to at least answer some of the outstanding forum questions ASAP.

About Me

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I'm a software developer who started programming at age 16 and never saw any reason to stop. I'm working on the Presentation Platform Controls team at Microsoft. My primary interests are functional programming, and Rich Internet Applications.