Beantown .NET / Boston .NET meeting -- Thursday, 5/6/2010: Chris Dias from Microsoft

April 22, 2010

Hi All --

Beantown .NET is going to be doing a joint meeting with Boston .NET meeting on Thursday, 5/6/2010.  This month we have Chris Dias from Microsoft.  Chris is the Visual Studio Group Program Manager and he’ll be talking about what’s new in Visual Studio 2010.

As always, our meeting is open to everyone so bring your friends and co-workers – better yet, bring your boss. It is not required to RSVP for our meetings but if you know you’re coming, please RSVP by email by 3pm on the day of the meeting to help speed your way through building security and to give us an idea how much pizza to order.

Future meetings:

- June 3 – TBA
- Beantown’s on vacation -- No July or August meeting

-Ben

When: Thursday, 5/6/10, 6p – 8p

**Where:
**Microsoft NERD
1 Memorial Drive
Cambridge, MA

Directions: http://microsoftcambridge.com/About/Directions/tabid/89/Default.aspx

Parking: Paid parking is available in 1 Memorial Drive.

Title: An Evening with Chris Diaz, Visual Studio Group Program Manager

Abstract:

Join us for this unique and timely opportunity to gain insights directly from the Visual Studio team with Chris Dias, Group Program Manager for the Visual Studio Platform team. The evening will include demonstrations and Q&A ranging from what's new in Visual Studio to a deeper look at extending Visual Studio in new and useful ways. You will leave with a deeper understanding of Visual Studio 2010 and the Visual Studio Platform.

Bio:

Chris is the Group Program Manager for the Visual Studio Platform team. In this role, he leads the best team of Program Managers at Microsoft designing and delivering the next generation Tools platform and developer experiences that are the foundation for the Visual Studio product line, from Express through Ultimate. In addition to engineering Visual Studio, Chris’ team is responsible for building a vibrant Ecosystem around our tools through the Visual Studio Industry Partner program.

Chris started at Microsoft 16 years ago in Product Support Services with Visual Basic 3.0.  He was the guy answering the phones at 6 a.m. specializing in data access technologies, specifically DAO and ODBC.  Chris provided support for the Beta releases of Visual Basic 4.0, working on forums answering questions, funneling feedback to the product team, and submitting bug reports from customers.  He joined the product team as a Program Manager for Visual Basic 5.0 and worked on almost every feature of VB over the next few years. Chris moved on to be the Group Program Manager for Visual Basic .NET 2002, 2003, and 2005.

In 2004 Chris became the Project Manager for the 2005 wave of product releases (Visual Studio .NET 2005, the .NET Framework, and Visual Studio Team Suite).  After the launch of VS 2005, he moved on to be the Business Manager for the Visual Studio product line, aligning the strategies for each of the businesses within Visual Studio (Pro, Non Pro, Tools, and ALM).

In 2007 Chris moved to his current role on the VS Platform team to begin the modernization of Visual Studio.  For VS2010, Chris’ team introduced a new, modern Editor with a rich extensibility model based on the Microsoft Extensibility Framework (MEF).  They updated the presentation layer of the VS shell to separate the UI from the data model and take advantage of the WPF platform.  The team created the new project system for Visual C++ based on MSBuild in order to increase the scalability and extensibility of native code projects.
Chris was born and raised in New England and now lives in Redmond, WA with his wife and children.

Categories: beantown-net-user-group-ineta team-foundation-server-2010 visual-studio-team-system-2010-vsts2010
Tags: team-build tfs