Help define, develop and test Microsoft's rich client platform - join the team!

2 March 2008

My office at MicrosoftHave big thoughts about where rich client apps could go? Want to work on a team at Microsoft where everyone has a Mac and a PC? What's the one feature you wish Silverlight 2 would have? Want a jump start on building sexy web mashups using the latest Silverlight bits? One of the reasons I love working at Microsoft is knowing that I'm able to play a big role in defining and developing pretty exciting technologies.  I work in the UI Frameworks & Services product unit - "UIFX" for short.  We're a big part of the .NET platform, and have built Silverlight 2, ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, Windows Forms, and more.  Developing for other software developers raises the bar quite a bit, and working on core server and client technologies means that my work could lead to awesome experiences for hundreds of millions of people. I've spent time throughout the industry wearing a lot of hats, from hobbyist to university student, sole proprietorship to being a partner in a dot-com, from LAMP guru to joining the ASP.NET team as a software design engineer in test.  Somehow I've never had as much fun as I am now - I'm challenged every day working on rich client technology that's going to make Microsoft developers everywhere smile. As a test lead, today I'm leading a team of awesome engineers to push the Microsoft rich client platform to the next level - we're building and testing apps to make sure that when you build your app that it works.  We're trying hard to 'break' Silverlight today so that when you get your hands on the Silverlight  2 beta, it'll meet your expectations (and then some - I've been playing with the data grid, cross-domain networking stack, ensuring that the Safari and Firefox experience on OS X rocks, ...)  I'm interacting with some of the best minds in the industry. I think you might be surprised at some of the things we're working on in the UIFX client test team - at the end of the day it is our job to make sure that our software does what it should, that its something that our customers want, and we're always the first people to start using all the features of our new products end-to-end. If you have industry experience - be it testing enterprise apps, Flex apps, building client apps, working with data mining- you name it, you and your skills could be a major asset for Microsoft.  If you're graduating from college soon, and would like to work in this space, we'd like you to consider joining our team. As SDETs (software design engineer in test), we work side-by-side with other software developers, program managers, architects, and programming writers; we dedicate time to advancing our discipline, learning new skills, exploring new ways of testing, developing tools and samples, and even writing shipping code from time-to-time.  The UIFX product unit is an excellent place to be an SDET. Which brings me to my point: if this sounds interesting to you, I bet there's a place here at Microsoft where you can make an awesome contribution.  We should talk - jeff.wilcox@microsoft.com (and I'm on LinkedIn too)!  Here's one of the job descriptions for my team.  If you're not familiar with the test discipline for software developers at Microsoft, there's some high-level test information online about the "passion for quality" and different roles that testers have at the company. Hope to hear from you!  p.s. I'll be in Las Vegas next week for the MIX'08 conference, in case we run into one another there and you'd like to hear more, or just tell me what you think about Silverlight.

Jeff Wilcox is a Software Engineer at Microsoft in the Open Source Programs Office (OSPO), helping Microsoft engineers use, contribute to and release open source at scale.

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