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Eric Lippert was one of the highlights of working at Microsoft. He was (and I'm sure, still is) very active on the internal C# mailing list. His answers are always very entertaining to read. He has a smugness that is deserved and not irritating (mostly :)), and inside the walls of MS he turns that smugness up quite a bit higher.

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I'm glad you enjoyed my answers; however, I am never intending to come across as smug. It is difficult to get across subtleties in an impoverished text-only medium; it has certainly been my experience that instructive and constructive criticism can easily be read as smugness. It's also been my experience that trying to deliberately make it sound less smug often just turns it into sounding like condescention. Text-based communication of technical issues is a hard problem and I do struggle with finding the right tone. Thanks for the feedback.

I don't think "smug" is quite the correct term. I meant nothing negative with my comment (and was teasing with the "mostly"). You do have an "air of authority" about your answers, but that authority is clearly earned. I enjoyed your answers on the C# mailing list quite a bit.

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