Today I am thrilled to announce that Erich Gamma will be joining the Visual
Studio team as a Microsoft Distinguished Engineer!  Erich’s contributions
have had a huge impact on the software industry.  Erich has a passion for
shipping high quality, elegant software, something he shared with the community
as co-author of Design Patterns.  He has always
had a passion for building tools to make development more productive and
pleasant. Together with Kent Beck he developed the JUnit unit test framework. He
was one of the key technical leads of the Eclipse project and he has lead the
Eclipse Java Development tools.  Recently his focus was on making teams
more effective. He was an initial member of the Jazz project and the technical
lead of Rational Team Concert. Finally, Erich has worked to bring teams together
across the application life cycle and he was the lead of Rational’s
Collaborative Lifecycle Management effort.

Erich will continue to live and work out of Zurich, Switzerland where we will
be opening a small Visual Studio development lab with Erich as the lead. 
Erich will join the lab in early August.  For those who are interested in
applying for positions with the new Zurich lab you can send mail to CHDevDiv@Microsoft.com
to get details.

The Visual Studio team is passionate about inspiring developers to create
great software.  We want to make developers successful and enable them to
continuously deliver value.  We are constantly looking for better ways to
accomplish these goals.  I’m very excited to have someone like Erich who
shares our passion join the team.  Please join me in welcoming Erich to the
Visual Studio team!