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My favorite: If Richard Feynman applied for a job at Microsoft.

Look for instance at .NET/C#. People are writing about this cool feature it has - delegates. But in Objective-C such behaviour is natural, and besides, requires no use of additional language features. Objective-C can be explained on few pieces of paper, you just have to remember some particular rules, whereas in C# or Java (or other object oriented staticly typed language) you have for each such thing a special case, which burdens your memory.

They may not have known how to prevent a buffer overflow, but probably know what happens when you throw rocks in a lake.

• Don Box, Indigo
• Chris Anderson, Avalon
• Rico Mariani, Performance
• Brad Abrams, Class Libraries
• Chris Brumme, CLR
• Raymond Chen, win32 guru
• Chris Sells, MSDN strategist
• Andy Pennell, Debugger

Even in Seattle you have to lie about working for Microsoft... I have lost TWO girls at parties because they asked me where I worked, and I said MS. Say what you want about the benefits or the long hours - It's the cockblocking that drives me nuts.

Now, there isn't exactly a shortage of people who don't immediately run away when they learn who you work for, but I think it's a bit like introducing yourself as an Enron exec - a large percentage of the public is pissed off at you for something. Could be antitrust, could be Clippy, could be job-envy.

If you want a pretty good insider viewpoint, read Proudly Serving My Corporate Masters , and the Microsoft Interview Page, and you'll have a pretty good idea what the experience is.

I'm about halfway though the book, and so far I think it is excellent. I've been reading it bit by bit over school and other projects. It's extremely readable, seems more informative than a 200-300 page O'Reilly book (which are great for intros, but this goes into a little more detail), and includes good coverage of JUnit testing and how it is integrated into ant.

I had a chance to meet Steve Loughran at Web Services DevCon East, and he's awesome. His website, including a great paper called When Web Services go Bad. He also has a SOAP development blog.

Microsoft Interview Questions

This is a great site for more information on interviewing at Microsoft. It has some sample questions, study materials and testimonials etc.

This poll indicates that some 75% of VC++ developers (poll states around 3 million) are MFC programmers. This would seem to indicate a fair number of MFC projects in existence, at least among the Visual C++ community. Granted, given the TOTAL number of Windows programmers, this number is quite small, as the vast majority are almost certainly Delphi or VB users; so you're correct.

Mr. Bloch is obviously familliar with the world of commercial development seeing he worked for SUN. I think what he has to say is very relevant. My brother has read his book and said it was great. Chris Sells from Developmentor also said it was good, reccomending it to C# programmers. Although the issues you mention are also relevant to software development I think what Mr. Bloch is talking about goes to the very core of what is required for good software development.