Erich Gamma will start working this August as a MS Distinguished Engineer.

Gamma was lately known for his works in team effectiveness at IBM Rational Team Concert, also associated with the Java language per his key involvement with the Eclipse project. However, he was first known for leading the list of authors of the best-selling book “Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software” –better known as the Gang of Four book, as its authors’ names were abbreviated as Gang of Four or simply GoF.

The GoF book, written in 1994 and winner of a Jolt award, came with many examples in C++ beside a few more in Smalltalk, having later gotten some independent “translations” to Java and C#. Therefore, it’s still today a highly influential resource in Object-Oriented Programming, both at the Academy and the CS industry.

Please welcome living legend Erich Gamma to the Visual Studio team!