28 February 2006

I work at Microsoft

Summary: I work at Microsoft. I started working here when I was 18. I grew up in Redmond, Washington. I attended Redmond elementary, Redmond Junior High and graduated from Redmond High School. It's only fitting that I should work at Microsoft. :) When people ask me what I do at Microsoft I say matter-of-factly, "I work in the Macintosh Business Unit." It's fun to see the consistently quizzical expressions on people's faces when I say that. A while back I got the hesitant response, "So, did Microsoft buy the Mac?" No, Microsoft has not "bought the Mac", but we do make some mighty fine software for the Mac OS. I am a part of the Infrastructure team. This means I'm a programmer that writes code that's used internally by most everyone else in the Business Unit. We write all our Mac tools almost exculsively with Xcode and the Cocoa APIs. It's a great place to be. It's a great time to be a Mac developer. My official title is Software Design Engineer in Test, which is a fancy way of saying a large part of my efforts are spent improving our testing efforts in the MacBU. Note: Almost no one ever says, Macintosh Business Unit, since everything at Microsoft must have a ancronym, ours is MacBU which is said, "mac boo". So that's the summary. More details to follow...

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi,

Here is a tip to make the life of your customer better. Make sure you test for upper ascii (text with accents) in your industrial use case tools. They are so many bugs for years that affects non english writing community ! But as the tester do not test for this... it goes un notice
Examples?
- Pict to WMF conversion of text label in arial (default) messing up accents when sending files from Office:Mac to win
- many crashes in PPT when trying to spell check with the contextual menu

just my 2c

David Weiss said...

Anonymous,

I am not aware of these problems, but I'll check into them and see what I can find out. More information, like which version of Mac Office, which version of Win Office and on which version of the Mac OS, is needed. Please feel free to email me directly with more info.

David Weiss

Anonymous said...

Why don't you write your *software* "almost exculsively with Xcode and the Cocoa APIs"?

Anonymous said...

You mean you guys didn't buy the Mac ?? ;-)) You sure bought *some* Mac though.
It's interesting to learn that you are using XCode fro mostly everything. If I have had to guess I would have thought that through the "heritage" from the MacOS <9 era you would have been coding in CodeWarrior.
I would guess it's a good sign for the development of a MacIntel native version then,

David, I also use accented characters and for the most, Office X and 2004 are OK (as long as you make usre Office is up to date). The only app I've ever had problems with was PPT and all bugs have carefully been reported :-)

Anonymous said...

Why don't you write your *software* "almost exculsively with Xcode and the Cocoa APIs"?

Hey, David, I can take this one, if you don't mind...

Because they'd like to ship another version sometime before the year 2012, as this would require them to completely rewrite their codebase? Because Carbon is a complete API peer of Cocoa as far as what you can do with it on the OS, so they don't NEED to?

David Weiss said...

Closing the loop on the accented characters...

I know of no current bugs related to accented characters. Make sure you are running the most current version of Office 2004.

If you still see problems, let me know either in the comments or via email and I'll make sure they get in our bug database.

Anonymous said...

oh thats so awesome. I would love working there...I love macs and and PC's so it would be cool.