{"id":3763,"date":"2008-10-25T00:00:26","date_gmt":"2008-10-25T00:00:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/vbteam\/2008\/10\/25\/community-interview-with-eric-knox-beth-massi\/"},"modified":"2024-07-05T14:05:51","modified_gmt":"2024-07-05T21:05:51","slug":"community-interview-with-eric-knox-beth-massi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/vbteam\/community-interview-with-eric-knox-beth-massi\/","title":{"rendered":"Community Interview with Eric Knox (Beth Massi)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here’s another community interview<\/a> from our Italian Visual Basic MVP Alessandro Del Sole<\/a>, this time with Eric Knox, Development Manager on the VB IDE Team. I got to know Eric at TechEd this year where we had a lot of fun floating in the pool on bright pink inner-tubes. \ud83d\ude09 You can also see Eric in the interview I did with the IDE Team a while back on Channel 9<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Also check out the Visual Basic Team page for pictures<\/a> and bios and visit the home page of the Visual Basic Developer Center<\/a> for a link to all these interviews<\/a> as well.<\/p>\n

Here’s the interview with Eric:<\/p>\n

1. Nice to meet you Eric Knox! Let’s begin by asking a simple question: Where are you from?<\/p>\n

I’m from Maryland, about 20 miles from both Baltimore, MD and Washington, DC.<\/p>\n

2. We all know that you’re a Visual Basic team member, but can you tell us something more about your role inside the team?<\/p>\n

I’m currently the Dev Manager for the “Developer Experience” or IDE part of the team. That means that I focus more on scheduling and oversight of VB than I do on any one feature.<\/p>\n

3. What’s your favorite Visual Basic feature, in the language and\/or the IDE?<\/p>\n

Definitely – Intellisense as of VS2008. It’s become a *huge* crutch that I depend on more than I realized.<\/p>\n

4. What makes VB a great programming language?<\/p>\n

It’s easy to read *and*<\/b> has full access to all of the .Net Framework. <\/p>\n

5. What brought you to Microsoft, and how long have you been working there? What was your occupation before joining the VB team? <\/p>\n

I have been at Microsoft for 14 years, and before VB, I worked as a developer in Access, Visual InterDev and even Microsoft Consulting Services as a developer consultant (doing mostly VB5 business objects in classic ASP).<\/p>\n

6. What’s it like working for Microsoft?<\/p>\n

I find that at Microsoft, I work with a lot of passionate, responsible and incredibly bright people. It’s fantastic to work amidst that much technical horsepower and commitment.<\/p>\n

7. Tell us something about your life outside of the office (how do you like to spend your free time, when you go out, when you’re at home, etc.)?<\/p>\n

I have a wife and two elementary-aged kids, so most of my non-work time is spent doing family-oriented things: going to soccer games, skiing lessons, swimming pools and even playing Wii (because I still think my kids are too young for a lot of Xbox games just yet :-)).<\/p>\n

8. Who is your favorite musician?<\/p>\n

Over time, the ones I always come back to at some point or another are Garbage and Billie Holiday (but there are so many more, depending on my mood).<\/p>\n

9. What’s your favorite food?<\/p>\n

Ahi tuna (and many other kinds of seafood)<\/p>\n

10. Have you ever been to Italy?<\/p>\n

\ud83d\ude41 No, although I have been thinking about how and when for many years.<\/p>\n

Thank you very much for taking time to answer these questions and telling us more about you!<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here’s another community interview from our Italian Visual Basic MVP Alessandro Del Sole, this time with Eric Knox, Development Manager on the VB IDE Team. I got to know Eric at TechEd this year where we had a lot of fun floating in the pool on bright pink inner-tubes. \ud83d\ude09 You can also see Eric […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":259,"featured_media":8818,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,195],"tags":[40,66,75],"class_list":["post-3763","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-team-member-interviews","category-visual-basic","tag-beth-massi","tag-eric-knox","tag-interview"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"

Here’s another community interview from our Italian Visual Basic MVP Alessandro Del Sole, this time with Eric Knox, Development Manager on the VB IDE Team. I got to know Eric at TechEd this year where we had a lot of fun floating in the pool on bright pink inner-tubes. \ud83d\ude09 You can also see Eric […]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/vbteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3763","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/vbteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/vbteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/vbteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/259"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/vbteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3763"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/vbteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3763\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/vbteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8818"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/vbteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3763"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/vbteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3763"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/vbteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3763"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}