Raible Designs

Going to work for Microsoft

I received a fair amount of feedback from yesterday's post. A few folks sent e-mails asking me to partner with them to start a company, and a couple of companies called claiming they could set me up with my "dream job". The call I didn't expect was from Ashwin Karuhatty of Microsoft. Ashwin is the Developer Evangelist that invited me to the Developer Summit in Redmond a few weeks ago.

He offered me a position with Microsoft being a Developer/Evangelist working on the Visual Studio Team to integrate Ajax-ish components into .NET. I've been doing a lot with Ajax stuff lately, and really enjoying myself, so I've accepted the position. I just submitted my two-weeks notice to my Project Manager and will become a Microsoftee on April 11. For the first 2 months, they're going to let me work out of my house, with an eventual move to Redmond, WA. I'm pretty excited about the move - both my parents and my sister live w/in 4 hours of Redmond. Sure it rains a lot there, but having family so close should make up for that.

If you have any suggestions for Ajax Components in Visual Studio, let me know!

Posted in Java at Apr 01 2005, 05:56:41 AM MST 35 Comments

Comments:

Congratulations with the new job, i hope it suits you! And family close by is allways an advantage. Good luck!

Posted by Koen on April 01, 2005 at 07:18 AM MST #

Wow. Just wow. I guess this blog will be shut down anytime now. Or is all of this an April Fool's joke?

Posted by 167.7.248.164 on April 01, 2005 at 07:23 AM MST #

Congrtas. Does this mean you will not be blogging much about JSF,tapestry,spring,struts etc? I guess the java community will surely miss you. - Neeraj

Posted by Neeraj Kumar on April 01, 2005 at 07:25 AM MST #

Oh, yes, quite so. Congratulations indeed. Was yesterday's post a setup for this one?

Posted by Joachim on April 01, 2005 at 07:26 AM MST #

Congrats Matt, one of the best april fool's jokes so far... ;-)

Posted by Lutz Zimmermann on April 01, 2005 at 07:29 AM MST #

Matt,

There are certain things that simply aren't appropriate for April Fools day jokes. You don't tell people that someone has died. You don't tell people you have cancer. And you don't tell people you have gone over to the Dark Side.

Posted by kelzer on April 01, 2005 at 08:14 AM MST #

"but I doubt I'd find a company that'd send me to conferences and pay for it"

Quality setup indeed. Thanks for the laughs.

Posted by jadamt on April 01, 2005 at 08:17 AM MST #

Ha Ha.... I'm no April Fool.....

Posted by Erik Weibust on April 01, 2005 at 08:39 AM MST #

Wow... this is almost better than AppFuse/Equinox :)

Posted by Abdullah Jibaly on April 01, 2005 at 08:52 AM MST #

Heh... just for one second I forgot the date. Seriously though, ever the quandry: your moral position vs. money. :)

Posted by mnickel on April 01, 2005 at 08:59 AM MST #

HA!

Posted by FF on April 01, 2005 at 08:59 AM MST #

Don't bring your iPod or Titnanium on campus. They will collect it and melt it. April 1st wow. That is two for you. Will AppFuse now have an ASP.net version? This was better than the one you did on your sourcebeat blog.

Posted by Rick Hightower on April 01, 2005 at 09:13 AM MST #

Doh, come on Matt, "I'm going to work for Microsoft" was last year's joke!

Posted by Kief on April 01, 2005 at 09:51 AM MST #

I hope this is an April Fool's joke!

Posted by isaacxu on April 01, 2005 at 10:12 AM MST #

That shit ain't funny! nice april fools day joke...

Posted by Steven Citron-Pousty on April 01, 2005 at 10:25 AM MST #

You had me going until "ajax."

Posted by Bob Lee on April 01, 2005 at 10:54 AM MST #

I've got a friend in the same group at Microsoft who told me that as part of your contract they're going to include stopping support of AppFuse and releasing .NetFuse. Fortunately most of the work has already been done in VS.Net (File -> New -> Project) so it shouldn't be too taxing. My friend also told me the real clincher for offering you a job came when, and I quote: "When Matt publicly admitted that he liked to publish his books using Word rather than DocBook we realized we had an opportunity to gain market share among authors. So in addition to his .NetFuse work, we're very optimistic about his Word evangilism. Matt really gets Word and can help less enlightened authors realize that the road less traveled doesn't get you to your destination any faster, it gets you lost!"

Posted by Todd Huss on April 01, 2005 at 12:02 PM MST #

Ah, one of the funniest since "moskvax!kremvax" posted to Usenet back on 4/1/1984 ( see http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=kremvax )... good one, Matt!

Posted by Chris Koenigsberg on April 01, 2005 at 12:03 PM MST #

If u join MS, I'm going to give up programming altogether and start using VB.NET

Posted by MV on April 01, 2005 at 12:37 PM MST #

BIGGEST MISTAKE OF YOUR LIFE.

Posted by Daniel on April 01, 2005 at 12:52 PM MST #

Suckers. Like everyone else, look at the date B4 u post.

Posted by Squashua on April 01, 2005 at 12:57 PM MST #

C´mon Matt, you're better than that. It's been a few years since blogs do exist and all years the same thing. Pretty boring, if you ask me. Not a novelty anymore.

Posted by Ale on April 01, 2005 at 02:07 PM MST #

Matt will create 'EdFuse', not '.NetFuse': http://j2ux.blogspot.com/2005/04/microsoft-beats-java-with-release-of.html

Posted by Lars Fischer on April 01, 2005 at 02:17 PM MST #

Well, if you do go to Redmond, you'll be in good company; Microsoft just acquired Electric Minds, too. :-)

Posted by Erbo on April 01, 2005 at 03:23 PM MST #

Hah! Now a blog on News.com.com.com has picked this up as a news story... Can't trust anything on April 1..

Posted by DH on April 01, 2005 at 05:21 PM MST #

Before reading the user comments, I actually believed Matt and I was like "Wow, thats perfect!". Perfect because I was hopeful that Matt would start something similar to Appfuse using MS technologies. I was primarily a Java server side developer and learned a great deal about web app development from Matt's projects which have a unique way of being simple enough to grasp the big picture yet complete. Although I don't plan to switch to .NET anytime soon, I was excited by the prospect that I would get to learn MS technologies the Matt way..

Posted by Sanjiv Jivan on April 01, 2005 at 08:29 PM MST #

Man. I thought this was a April fools day joke until I read the MS press release. Holy Crap! Either this is the best prank or MS is in on it.

Posted by Rick Hightower on April 01, 2005 at 09:12 PM MST #

Either way - you are a wealthy man. I hope it IS a 4/1 joke. I cannot imagine a hardcore java guy who is independent and uses his Powerbook and rides to work would trade up to the dark side, embrace rain, humidity, leftist kooks and software that crashes. Good luck to you either way.

Posted by Grego on April 01, 2005 at 10:58 PM MST #

I could not move there. I like sunshine too much. :o)

Posted by Rick Hightower on April 01, 2005 at 11:10 PM MST #

Okay Matt, come on, end this insanity.

Posted by Sean on April 02, 2005 at 01:15 AM MST #

Damn, I know there's a lot of AJAX stuff going on at Microsoft but you had me going there for a while.

Posted by Robert Scoble on April 02, 2005 at 01:26 AM MST #

???

Posted by RockSun on April 02, 2005 at 03:06 AM MST #

Nice.

Posted by Pedro on April 02, 2005 at 09:31 AM MST #

hee hee. For a moment, I almost thought you were seriously considering Ajax a worthwhile technology. Whew, that a knee slapper. Are all the other Ajax blogs by other people jokes too? If so, did they have me going.

Posted by Michael Slattery on April 04, 2005 at 01:15 PM MDT #

What do you think about something like http://weblogs.asp.net/mschwarz is doing with the Ajax.NET Wrapper DLL?

Posted by Michael Schwarz on April 12, 2005 at 07:49 PM MDT #

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