Moving on

It's been an interesting journey, these last 3 ½ years. I was hired at Microsoft, after an internship the summer before my senior year, to work on a long-lead effort creating new IDE components and developer tools. On my first day back, my boss from the internship sat me down and broke the news that that project I'd come back to work on had been canceled. Instead, I was told we'd be putting the editor from that project into Visual Studio, which would require a fairly small shim layer to get things working. Since then, I’ve had 3 leads (Tim, Fiona, and Michael), moved offices only once (!), written a lot of shims, released 14 extensions to the VS gallery with ~130,000 (non-unique) downloads, worked with a lot of other VS teams to make the editor not crash too much, helped Blend/Powershell/DynamicsAX host the editor outside of VS, wrote box selection, contributed to a number of other VS2010 editor features, fixed about 400 bugs, and collected only one “official” demerit.

I feel that it's time for something new, so I've decided to pursue career opportunities outside Microsoft. My last day here is February 18th, after which I'll be starting a new job in Kirkland.

I'm not sure what will happen to this blog. If the articles are taken down, you can the source (in markdown) for most of them on my github blog project. You can also continue to find me on twitter (@noahsmark), and email me (I'm noah, the domain is noahsmark.com).

I'm not sure who all reads this blog, but I want to say thanks to you anyways. One of my favorite parts of working on the editor has been working with people writing extensions for Visual Studio, so thanks for all the questions and feedback.