felixrieseberg

Hey! @hausdorff (Hi Alex!) below already commented on it, but feel free to hit me up. We do things with devdiv and there are a bunch of people who're into releasing things - just hit me up via email (felix.rieseberg@microsoft.com), I'm happy to chat about it!

Happy to explain a bit! I work with developers out there, putting code on GitHub, contributing to other projects or making our own stuff work better with open source projects. I also "hack" on our new and upcoming products (we have a bunch of hardware announced and already out there where SDKs haven't been released yet), trying to see how well they play with "the open source world". I also visit dev conferences around the world, talking about the code we wrote and the lessons we learned.

My job is kind of awesome - I'm basically at a full-time hackathon, juggling my MacBook, Windows Notebook, a bunch Cloud solutions, some IoT devices and whatever our hardware teams come up with.

The team is brand new - and we're still hiring. Hit me up (felixrieseberg.com / @felixrieseberg) if you're interested!

I'm an Open Source Engineer, working for Microsoft, living in Cyanogen Inc's former hq/office.

I don't know anything about this deal, but I adore how small Silicon Valley sometimes is.

Interestingly, if you'd like to check out how some of these features were implemented, you totally can. Roslyn is open-source (http://roslyn.codeplex.com/).

That being said, I hope that all the open-sourcing is going to make it available where I really want to use it - Unity, for instance. (Disclaimer: I'm an open source dev @ Microsoft)

I am one of those people who always felt that Android didn't look nearly as good as it was feature-loaded. Feeling that I could always do pretty much anything with a powerful Android phone, I'm happy to see Google taking a serious big swing at design.

Felix the Microsoftie here. You've been able to use C# code and compile for Linux for a while now - thanks to Mono. The challenge is that the Windows implementation has one code base while Mono has a complete separate code base.

The Mono community was essentially forced to re-implement .NET because no open source implementation was available. Customers have reported various mismatches, which are hard to fix because neither side can look at the code of the other side. This also results in a lot of duplicated work in areas that aren’t actually platform specific. The best way to build a cross-platform stack is to build a single stack, in a collaborative manner. Mono and .NET aren't one, but they'll be able to work together in an unprecedented way. There's Linux stuff in Mono that we would like to use (and vice versa).

To answer your last question: Yup.

Microsoftie here. Pure speculation on my part, but Visual Studio in its full form might be one of the most impressive pieces we have at Microsoft - but definitely one of the most complex. Good intentions aside, bringing VS over to *nix would involve a gigantic amount of (costly) man hours...

This keeps coming up, so let me make this super clear: While access to the download expires after three years, all software downloaded up to that point remains your property, including the licenses.

Even for the exception, Windows Server, you'll get four production licenses as a farewell gift. Given that StackOverflow runs on 25 Windows Servers, this can't be a bad deal.

I love seeing new attempts at creating a community for game developers, but I see one issue right now - the site seems to have no apparent benefit over http://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev, which has already more than 110,000 subscribers. Where do you guys see the advantage?

This looks really, really interesting. It also seems like they're thinking a lot about tooling, which I appreciate - there's a lot of stuff out there right now, I assume the true differentiator will be in the tooling.

On that note, there's a weird "don't go back" loop at https://www.spark.io/signup.

This is a great time to reiterate that startups receive Microsoft's software for free, obviously including all versions of Visual Studio.

Check out BizSpark.com or get in touch with me if you happen to be a YC company (felix.rieseberg@microsoft.com).

(Also, sorry for popping up in all the threads - We have a lot of threads here right now about VS options and I want to make sure that people know that they might be able to get VS Ultimate for free.)

This is a great time to reiterate that startups receive Microsoft's software for free, obviously including all versions of Visual Studio.

Check out BizSpark.com or get in touch with me if you happen to be a YC company (felix.rieseberg@microsoft.com).

Nice widget, congrats on launching! I'd love to see it in action without signing up though, so you might want to consider adding a giant "demo" button somewhere.

Take this as my own personal opinion, but before I went back into engineering, I worked with a bunch of developers out there to integrate with all kinds of our stuff - and outside of game development, C/C++ isn't the most popular choice. We have some code samples [0], but I see what you mean.

The office team moving away from the old plugin model and opening up the gates for JS apps and REST APIs made life dramatically easier for a lot of folks. So I assume that samples were written with the most popular choices in mind. Internally, C++ is king [0], of course.

It's also worth pointing out that we always accept code samples from the community :)

[0]: https://code.msdn.microsoft.com/office/site/search?f%5B0%5D.... [1]: http://cppcon.org/bonus-talk-cxx-in-ms-office-2014/

As the Microsoftie in this thread I feel compelled to point out that you don't need an extensive partnership with us to integrate with office.

And I'm not talking about the plugin development hell (never had to work with it, but that seemed, erm, "difficult"). Feel free to reach out to me if you have questions, or just read the docs yourself (http://dev.office.com/).

Hey, I'm an Open Source Engineer with MSFT (and the msft dude for YC) - there isn't anything out yet, but we have always released SDKs for pretty much anything we build.

My 'Open Source Strategic Engagements' team at MSFT is totally using it. Slack is awesome. It has a good Skype integration, which is how we can call each other. It's the best chatroom solution I've seen in a while. Skype and Lync are trying to do something else and we're very happily using all of them!

I like it. I also think that writing code with the intention of releasing it under your own name forces you to write good documentation, clean code and test properly.

Of course, just like my plans to read books every single day, I never succeeded in keeping that up.

I might be a bit late to the party, but if anyone is interested in copying the Stack Overflow setup, we're offering startups free software, 60k in Azure credits for accelerator-backed companies and engineering mentoring, if required. Find me at felixrieseberg.com or felix.rieseberg@microsoft.com and I can set you up.

True - but remember, there's a bunch of teams building stuff. Most of Open Tech's and Azure's open code bases are on GitHub. TypeScript isn't the biggest MS project on GitHub and I just want to make sure that nobody is using this as a "CodePlex is dead!" data point.

https://github.com/MSOpenTech https://github.com/Azure/

Truth be told, CodePlex is fairly popular in the .NET world. TypeScript simply is a JavaScript project, plays well with Node, NPM and Jake - I think it makes sense for it to be on GitHub. It's not the first MSFT source base hosted on GitHub, probably won't be the last. Heck, I work at MSFT and keep all my open source code on GitHub.

I wouldn't read too much into that though - huge company, a bunch of projects and different audiences. CodePlex has an audience - there's a bunch of cool projects on there, too.

That's exactly the right approach!

If any YC startups are interested in checking out Azure, note that Microsoft grants $60k in usage credits (as well as architecture and engineering support). Shoot me a mail at felix.rieseberg@microsoft.com and I'll help you out!

In case you haven't done so, do submit a comment. It's easy to be cynical about its impact, but this is currently the official way of making your voice heard.

There's merit in reminding people that a lot of development contains a decent amount of Googling, but I'm not sure that "knowing which code is best to copy-paste" is the main trait of coding.

What's certainly true is that learning how to code is dramatically easier than it ever has been; and is likely to get easier as time passes. Learning how to code is indeed pretty easy, knowing how to build a complex product goes beyond that, though.

Didn't mean to annoy anyone, I'm nowhere near the office team. The downvotes speak for themselves though, so I guess apologies are in order.

Google Docs is a neat tool and I love their mobile apps, but if you're interested in checking out alternatives, I can recommend Office Online . It's pretty neat. And free.

https://office.com/start/default.aspx

Hey guys, Felix from Microsoft here. Some of you may know me as the guy who's working with YC companies. A quick PSA:

We sponsor YC companies with $60,000 in free Azure usage.

Get in touch with me at felix.rieseberg@microsoft.com if you have any questions!

I actually think that this is slightly less detailed than the Bing Maps Preview, where I could see my friend's car parked in front of his research institute - I'm impressed that it's running in a browser though.

http://www.bing.com/dev/en-us/maps-preview-app

A tiny Zombie Shooter (www.snipezombies.com)