I'm back

Hello.

Welcome
to my second generation, re-engineered, upgraded weblog. I'm really excited to
finally have enough time to return to this medium. My old blog lasted about a month, before
I got busy and backlogged. I did keep collecting blog topics in the intervening
two years, so I now have enough to talk about to last me till next year. I’ll
try to keep this one going longer. Fingers crossed.

As
you can tell from the heading, my name is Martyn Lovell. I'm a development lead
in the Visual C++ group. I
currently own the VC++
Libraries team, which is responsible for the C
Runtime Library (CRT), Standard
C++ Library (SCL), Microsoft
Foundation Classes (MFC), Active
Template Library (ATL). My team also own a bunch of new library code to
help work with managed code -- I'll take some time to talk about this here in
the future. As well as my work in libraries, I'm one of the leaders in Visual
C++’s effort to allow seamless intermingling of managed and native code.
Of course, like everyone else, I work on a few other problems too...

I've
been at Microsoft for almost 10 years, all of it spent in the developer
division. I started out working on the Developer Studio IDE, and then was one
of the people who worked to architect a
next generation IDE that could be an extensible platform
for developer tools -- which became our current IDE. Next I was
on Visual
Studio Analyzer, a tool for understanding and visualising COM-based
applications. For several years, I also owned the source
control integration code in several IDEs, and was part of a project that
was a precursor of the Visual Studio Team System.

The
best thing about the development community now (compared to 10 years ago when I
started at Microsoft) is the number of different ways we get to meet, interact
with, listen to and understand our customers and partners. I’ve always
enjoyed speaking at conferences and visiting developers for just this reason.
But now we get to do so much more of this. Please keep sending me your
questions, comments and feedback. Customer input had a major impact on the
choices we made for Visual Studio 2005, and we’re now just starting the
process of defining our next versions. So this is a great time to get in touch
if you have ideas on what should come next for Visual C++.

Of
course, not all
of my time is spent at work. Like most blogs on MSDN, I'll mostly focus on
technical issues here. You can find out more (too much) about me on my personal web site. Some of it is out
of date, in keeping with the best traditions of personal web sites. You can
find everything there -- pictures, links, reviews of concerts I've gone to,
abstruse puzzles and an insanely long list of movies.

One
of the best things about blogging is the two-way communication it encourages.
Please do feel free to add comments, and to write to me (martynl@microsoft.com) if you have
questions or comments on anything you find here, anything I work on or have
worked on, or anything else that takes your fancy. I'm not always rapid at
replying to email, but I do try to get there eventually. Of course, if you're
looking for immediate help with a technical problem, you'll normally be best to
start with our newsgroups. We have a very smart and highly motivated set of
MVPs who answer questions very quickly. And if you need to report a bug in
Visual Studio, then the Product
Feedback Centre is the ideal place to do that. Bugs reported there rapidly
get to the attention of the team involved, and we have great tracking
mechanisms for these issues.

A
reminder - everything here is my personal opinion, not that of Microsoft or of
anyone else. These postings are provided "AS IS" with no warranties,
and confer no rights. Consider yourself disclaimed.

Enough
about me. On to the real content. I’m looking forward to hearing from
you.

Martyn