Microsoft Hires .Net Guru

Clemens Vasters, a longtime "friend" of Microsoft Corp., will soon be joining the software giant to work on the upcoming communications platform for the Vista operating system.

Vasters, who is the co-founder and chief technology officer at Microsoft partner Newtelligence AG, of Korschenbroich, Germany, will join Microsoft in Redmond, Wash., as the community program manager on the WCF (Windows Communication Foundation), also known as Indigo.

Vasters will assume his new role as of Feb. 1, sources said.

"In my initial role I will be, amongst other things, responsible for establishing a vivid two-way communication between the product team and the community out there, not only including friends of the firm such as the regional directors or Most Valuable Professionals, but also with speakers, bloggers, magazine and/or book authors, no matter which stance they have on the product," Vasters told eWEEK.

Resource Library:

"Microsoft is continuing to somehow lure the best and the brightest in the different fields to come and join the mother ship—even when they have been successfully running their own companies," said a source familiar with Vasters situation.

Click here to read about Microsofts recent hiring of a Shared Source Initiative chief.

"This is a great gain for MS, and should prove to be a big plus for the MS developer community as well."

Vasters has been close to Microsoft for some time. He has been one of a "posse" of .Net software experts that includes Microsoft software architect Don Box, Juval Lowy, chief architect at IDesign Inc., and others in a power clique.

"The general public is well aware of the visible and extroverted folks like Don Box, Doug Purdy, Steve Swartz and Yasser Shohoud, to name just a few, but theres an even greater number of invisible people working in that group, who quite literally know it all and possess an extraordinary combination of visionary skill and power to execute," Vasters said. "And that quality and the challenge of working in such a group have a gravitational pull thats hard to escape."

In his blog earlier this month, Vasters wrote about support for REST (Representational State Transfer) and POX (Plain Old XML) in Indigo.

"A little bit more than half a year ago, I got invited to a meeting at Microsoft in Redmond and discussed with Steve Swartz, Yasser Shohoud and Eugene Osovetsky how to implement POX and REST support for Indigo," he said.

In addition, Vasters wrote a two-part post on "Teaching Indigo to do REST/POX."

Meanwhile, Vasters also told eWEEK: "Microsoft can be proud of what theyve built with WCF, and I am honored that theyve accepted me into this incredible team, where Ill certainly be able to learn a lot every day. And thats really the motivation for me leaving the firm Newtelligence that I helped build. There is no other place anywhere in this industry with so much concentrated knowledge about distributed systems technology as in the Connected Systems Division at Microsoft."

Moreover, said Vasters, "Microsoft did hire me because—or even though?—they know that it is part of my character to be rather direct and to the point and to call things what they are. I have little intent to change that."

Vasters said leaving the firm he helped create is "very difficult," but said he is leaving Newtelligence in the capable hands of his partners. "Knowing that the company and especially our great employees will be doing well and the company would prosper without me was an absolute prerequisite for me joining Microsoft," he said.

Editors Note: This story was updated to include comments from Vasters.

Check out eWEEK.coms for Microsoft and Windows news, views and analysis.