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.
About the Author: Rick Kiessig has been doing software design and development for more than 30 years. He is an independent software consultant who focuses on architecting and building large-scale web sites using .NET and SQL Server. He has worked with and advised companies such as MySpace, Shop.com, Microsoft, and eBay. While at Microsoft, Rick worked as an architect and developer for MSN, and later at the Microsoft Technology Center (MTC). His experience at the MTC included leading frequent architectural design sessions with some of Microsoft's largest customers to help them optimize the architectures of their web sites and other software. Before coming to Microsoft, Rick worked as an independent consultant in Silicon Valley. Projects included developing a large-scale content management system, and architecting systems to deliver web content to millions of interactive TV subscribers. He also developed mission-critical real-time software for spacecraft that have flown to Mars several times, to the moon and to a nearby comet. Rick has been an Internet user and developer since 1974.