Like personal ads and job application cover letters, a weblog introduction entry is
bound to be awkward, a bit stilted and vaguely self-aggrandizing. So let's get it
over with as quickly as possible, shall we?
I am the author of this weblog, and my name is Paul Vick. Since this weblog will most
likely be more oriented towards the technical than the personal, I'll start with the
professional side of my life: my current job is Technical Lead on the Visual Basic
.NET product at Microsoft, although I've been around Microsoft long enough now (11
years and counting) to have done a variety of things. I've been on the Visual Basic
team for 6 years now, most of it closely associated with the core Visual Basic compiler
(as opposed to, say, the data access components, debugger or IDE). For a long while,
my primary responsibility has been overseeing the development of the compiler (I'm
a programmer), but recently I've been focusing more on the design aspects of the language
and the broader product. Oh, and I'm the author of the Visual Basic .NET Language Specification, which I add because it's probably the most
tangible result of my work of the past several years. (I'm also working on a Visual
Basic language reference book, but believe that when you see it...)
On the personal front, I live in Seattle, WA with my wife and two cats. I do have
a life outside of work, but I think I'll let those details come into the weblog naturally
rather than making this entry really start sounding like a personal ad...