Don Box and Doug Purdy on Oslo!
Richard and Carl talk with Don Box and Doug Purdy about Microsoft code-name Oslo, a nascent set of developer tools and technologies that promise to make development much easier than it is today.
Guests:
Don Box
Don Box is an architect at Microsoft working on declarative languages and tools to simplify developing applications and services. In that role, Don is involved in creating languages, frameworks, and end-to-end experiences to help people translate their intentions and desires for software into a machine readable and executable form. Don joined Microsoft in 2002 as an architect of Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), where he worked on software to enable programs to safely and securely interoperate with one another. Don's responsibilities included both the design and architecture of the runtime stack, as well as interoperability protocols with IBM and other partners. Before joining Microsoft, Don was an independent consultant focused on software integration technologies. Don was the leading external voice for Microsoft's Component Object Model (COM) and Microsoft Transaction Server (MTS) and helped shape the way developers across the globe experience those technologies. In 1996, Don worked as a consultant to Software AG and Microsoft on the UNIX-based Distributed COM project; that work gave Don the desire to move away from shared-runtime distributed architectures and embrace data-centric message passing using XML. To that end, Don worked with Microsoft and Dave Winer to create the original SOAP specification in 1998. Don is a respected writer on software development topics, serving as a series editor at Addison Wesley and as a contributing editor to C++ Report, Microsoft Systems Journal (MSJ), and MSDN Magazine. Don's first book, Essential COM, remains a part of the C++ developer's canon. Don was the first blogger to publish RSS from a Microsoft web property (http://www.gotdotnet.com/) and now (sporadically) maintains a blog at http://www.pluralsight.com/blogs/dbox/ Don has a Master's degree in Information and Computer Science from U.C. Irvine and a Bachelor's degree in Mathematics from C.S.U. Long Beach.
Doug Purdy
Douglas Purdy is a product unit manager at Microsoft working on next-generation languages and tools to broaden the franchise of people building applications. His vision is to "make everyone a programmer" (even if they don't know it). Previously, Douglas was the group program manager for the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF/Indigo) and Windows Workflow Foundation (WF/WinOE) teams. Douglas has been with Microsoft, on and off, since 1998 where he has worked in consulting, evangelism and engineering.