About 3 month ago, I attended Microsoft TechFest ’07 held in three Southern California Universities: University of California at Santa Barbara, University of California at Los Angeles, University of Southern California. TechFest is organized by Microsoft recruiting and the purpose of the TechFest is to demonstrate our cool and innovative technologies and attract more graduates to Microsoft. Apart from Visual C++, nine other Microsoft groups come to TechFest. They were:

·         Microsoft Expression

·         Device User Experience, Documents and Printing

·         Windows Desktop Experience

·         Windows Virtualization Team

·         Mobile Communications

·         Windows Live OneCare

·         Microsoft Game Studios Publishing Team

·         Live Labs

·         Microsoft Office

It is a very exciting experience to talk to so many students. In every school, students are all very eager to learn about Microsoft technologies and the job opportunities in Microsoft. I am very excited to see that there are so many students interested in Visual C++ and job opportunities on the C++ team. Often times students lined up in my booth to ask questions. I talked to the students about our group: compiler, library and IDE. I talked to the students about our strategy to continue supporting native development and about our customer segments. I outlined a few areas that we are planning to improve: MFC, compiler, intellisense, project and build system, IDE performance and scalability, etc. I demonstrated the new MFC –Ribbon application and a few other applications based on MFCNext. Students were all amazed with the modernized MFC applications. There were also questions around project system makefile support, the “New Project From Existing Files” feature has served their needs. One student asked about native refactoring. Students also had questions about managed code support.

Many students have questions about the career opportunities in Microsoft. They ask me about the differences between the developer, test and Program Manager tracks, so I would explain to them the different talents we are looking for being a dev, tester and PM. I also explained to them about test automation to assure them that in Microsoft, testers also write code and have the career path of becoming a test architect.  Many students expressed their interests in the Visual C++ group as either a dev/test/PM and left me with contact info or resumes. As a result, we have recently extended an offer to one of the highly qualified candidates.

Overall this was a very successful event. It connected the students with Microsoft technologies as well as people in Microsoft. I enjoyed the opportunity of meeting so many young and talented students and feel honored that I can give them a little help for their future career.

Li Shao

Visual C++ IDE