Ah, another week and another Windows Phone team member is moving on to other things. Yes, Jeff Wilcox who's a Senior Software Development Engineer at Microsoft and who was responsible for many aspects of the Windows Phone SDKs (7.0, 7.1) is moving to Microsoft's Azure team to work on their cloud services. From his personal blog:
"I’ve decided that for 2012, I would like to move to the Windows Azure team to focus on the open source story for Microsoft’s cloud. At Microsoft we’re becoming more and more involved in exciting new success stories and tech such as Node.js – along the way we’ve even started using GitHub to accept community open source contributions and make these things better. There’s a great opportunity here and I want to be there to be a part of it all."
Wilcox's work has been key to making Windows Phone devs happy by giving them the necessary tools and tricks to make their jobs easier. Our own Jay Bennett often refers to him as "Gandalf" out of admiration for his work to the platform, so his moving will surely be missed. In turn, we asked Jeff what his proudest contribution to the Windows Phone SDK was:
"My proudest contribution is the Pivot control for the Windows Phone team - I worked hard to bring it to developers in 7.0 and it turned out pretty well. The few bugs (yeah, like SelectedIndex sometimes getting angry) were frustrating, but we did an awful lot with the time allotted and I'm happy to see it in the tens of thousands of Windows Phone apps in the Marketplace. Yeah, there was a time we weren't sure that we would provide the Pivot and Panorama controls to developers :-) we've come so far. It's been a blast."
Many of you non-devs will know his work from something else though: 4th & Mayor. Yes, Jeff is the man behind the super popular Foursquare client which started off as an alternative and now with 60,000 regular users, it has quickly become one of the top apps on the platform. The good news here is Jeff will continue working on 4th & Mayor in 2012 and 2013 with regular updates, including a Windows 8 desktop version for the Microsoft Store. Eventually he'll open source it using the Apache 2.0 license which should be an exciting contribution.
We'd like to personally extend out thanks to Jeff for his work on Windows Phone over these last few years. He's helped in solidifying the foundation for this OS and in making developers content with their tools. We wish him the best of luck on the Azure team and we look forward to more 4th & Mayor goodness in the future.
We're also told that he's not completely done yet with WP7 and has some "powerful developer phone stuff coming up soon". Stay tuned...
Source: Jeff Wilcox's blog
