If you follow Microsoft’s web development world you might have noticed an interesting trend dating back to January of this year. You see, back in January they hired
RubyCLR guru
John Lam. In July they hired top tier (.NET) blogger and lead developer of the dasBlog open source blog engine
Scott Hanselmen. More recently they’ve hired
Phil Haack, lead developer for
SubText another .NET blog engine and now they’ve hired
Rob Conery the developer of
SubSonic.
It’s possible and perhaps the hiring trend extends further back than January although these four hires alone seem fairly significant in the realm of .NET based OS software. It makes me wonder if perhaps Jeff Atwood is next? He just finished writing An ASP.NET 2.0 Anthology with none other than Phil Haack (and a few others) and already has a deal with Microsoft where they’ll match his OS donations. Of course, ScottGu is a big blogger and he personally reached out to Rob Conery so it wouldn’t surprise me if Scott and his crew have "gone shopping" for people who are influential .NET bloggers as well as OS developers. In fact, Rob talked about the significance of keeping his blog as well as his SubSonic work alive and I’m sure similar conversations occurred with ScottH and Phil.
To top it all off, check out this email from last May that Clemens Vasters (the original dasBlog developer) sent to the dasBlog developer’s mailing list. Here is a quote from that message.
"The purpose of this work is, as indicated, to use the engine as a testbed for a lot of new technologies we’re bringing online in RTM or Beta form over the course of the next several months. The current intent is to have all dasBlog-based bloggers from our division here at Microsoft and also the one or the other official "team blog" run on that testbed."
I’ve been using dasBlog for about a year now and I really like it so all this attention will be interesting to watch. I wonder what it means for SubText?
