VSX Team

Group Manager - I have the best job ever! My passion for software development pushed me to create development tools. Now my love of development tools has led me to produce the tools for building development tools. I don't know if I'm climbing further up the stack or falling deeper into a pit, but whatever it is it sure feels right. I can't wait to start delivering new and enhanced tools that will allow developers to create custom tools for their own special needs.

Lead Program Manager - There are so many things going on in our team and in the VSX Community! From holding developer labs to engaging with MVPs, and from shipping the Visual Studio Shell to rethinking the tooling experience in the Visual Studio SDK, we are dedicated to enabling ISVs and enthusiasts in extending Visual Studio. For me personally, it's really exciting to see the VSX Community harness its creativity and create innovative projects that make Visual Studio an even better product. I am thrilled about all the upcoming VS SDK enhancements that we have planned over the next year to make extending Visual Studio easier!

VSIP and VS Gallery Program Manger - I love seeing our partners be successful. Every day I get to work with a new customer who is as passionate as we are about reaching out to millions of Visual Studio developers. As a computer scientist now focused on business, I'm energized by cool new technologies that will add value for customers. Find me at upcoming conferences or clinics and tell me how we can make your products more successful.

VS SDK Program Manager - I joined the Visual Studio Extensibility team in December 2007. Our team is focused on helping developers extend the Visual Studio shell. The Visual Studio Industry Partners (VSIP) program has been around since Visual Studio 2005 and in November 2007, the team shipped the Visual Studio 2008 SDK for developers to build on top of VS 2008. It's an exciting time as over 200 partners have signed up with the VSIP program and there are many developers building extensions for Visual Studio. The VS SDK contains a ton of samples, tools, and documentation to help you get started.

Aaron Marten is a Software Development Engineer at Microsoft in the Visual Studio Ecosystem group. He has been working in various capacities on the Visual Studio SDK and Visual Studio Extensibility (VSX) since 2003. He presents regularly on various VSX topics at Microsoft's VSIP conferences and has presented at industry conferences such as Lang.NET, TechEd, and DevTeach. His blog covers the finer points of adding custom extensions to Visual Studio. Aaron received his B.S. degree in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Software Engineer - After spending the previous five years in the Microsoft Office division, I am excited to be a part of the Visual Studio Ecosystem team. It's great to see the amazing work that has been done for the upcoming Visual Studio 2008 release with the new VS 2008 Shell and the possibilities that it introduces. I look forward to the upcoming releases as we strive to make extending and using the Visual Studio SDK easier and more productive.

Software Engineer - The recently announced Visual Studio Shell should enable scenarios from domains that are quite unrelated to the current focus of Visual Studio. I am very interested in seeing these new products take shape as it should greatly increase interest in the extension of Visual Studio itself. The rest of the SDK team and I will be hard at work making the development experience easier to use and to deploy these applications.

After studies in Ecole Superieure d'Electricite (Supelec), and a Master of Science at Caltech (mainly studying concurrent computing and computational neural systems), I got passionate about software modeling, more specifically graphical software modeling, meta-modeling. I was a passionate early adopter of DSL Tools, and had the chance to be technical reviewer the DSL book by Steve, Stuart, Gareth, and Allan. With a few friends, we created the French http://www.dslfactory.org community at the origin of several labs, workshops on DSL Tools, and a VSX Day in Paris. I joined the Cambridge Visual Studio Ecosystem in March 2008 as a Program Manager, and I will work with the VSX team in adding new features to DSL Tools and enhancing the Visual Studio SDK.

Software Engineer - I've recently joined the Ecosystem team and have been working on improving the Visual Studio Shell experience. I'm looking forward to seeing what innovations our community will bring to the Visual Studio platform with the advent of the VS Shell and the continual improvements to the VS SDK.

Software Architect - Gareth Jones is a software architect in the Visual Studio Ecosystem team at Microsoft. For the last four years he's been working on DSL Tools and software factories and now he's broadening those techniques to help make extending Visual Studio with any of your own tools a much easier, more accessible proposition. He co-authored the book, Domain-Specific Development with Visual Studio DSL Tools with other members of the DSL Tools team. Previously at Microsoft he has been a development manager for bespoke enterprise solutions, led the development of Microsoft's bCentral UK business portal and managed a consultancy team focused on ISVs. Before joining Microsoft, Gareth led developments in the intelligence analysis, simulation, and aerospace industries.

Senior Program Manager - Stuart Kent joined Microsoft in 2003 to work on tools and technologies for visual modeling, which culminated in the Domain-Specific Language Tools, which are now part of the Visual Studio core tooling platform and are described in a recent book (Domain-Specific Development with Visual Studio DSL Tools) that he co-authored. Stuart is now a Senior Program Manager with the Visual Studio Ecosystem team and is responsible for driving the development of tools to make it much easier to create extensions for Visual Studio -- tools to build tools, as well as the continued evolution of DSL Tools. Before joining Microsoft, he was an academic and consultant with a reputation in modeling and model-driven development. He has over 50 publications to his name and made significant contributions to the UML 2.0 and MOF 2.0 specifications. He is a member of the editorial board of the Software and Systems Modeling journal, and on the steering committee for the MoDELS series of conferences. He has a PhD in Computing from Imperial College, London.

Software Architect - I've been working on the DSL Tools since they started. I am thrilled that we are now officially part of the VS Ecosystem team. This gives us a platform to integrate graphical designers into other aspects of VSX, and as we move forward to take advantage of other exciting technologies that are emerging in Visual Studio and .NET such as LINQ and WPF.