Adam seemed OK with that, but the database thing bothered me for days.

I told Adam I’d look into it, then began preaching caution: Perhaps we could start off with a static site and add database interactivity as we (read: me) figured it out. What did I know about databases? We’re a small company even today, but at the time I was the only technical person in the group. I looked out the window past the Bay Bridge and began wondering about my future. I was pretty excited about it and began planning it all in my head when Adam said something I only half-heard. It was pretty ambitious-lots of interaction, Web discussion groups, and user personalization. It was early December 1996.Īdam began to discuss a new Web site we had decided to pursue, called “LOFY” (“Looking Out For Yourself”). I had arrived in California to install and set up our new Dell PowerEdge Web server at a colocation facility in San Jose and everything was looking good. I remember the day very clearly: Adam Ray, the president of Big Tent Media Labs, had picked me up at the airport in San Francisco and we were driving to his home in Berkeley. It did an excellent job, but obviously there could be a few typos in there.

I used the iPhone version of Microsoft’s excellent Office Lens app to scan this text in from the paper version of the book.

In reading this, I see that my memory is a bit off: I had the Boston event pegged to late 1996, but that is when the CDs arrived.

It’s goofy to say this about something that I wrote, but seems really good to me. It was the first of two books I wrote about this amazing product, and looking back at this today, I’m actually pretty proud of both my technical acumen-vestigial these days, thanks to my career change-and writing style.

This is the introduction I wrote for the book Implementing Microsoft Visual InterDev, which was published in 1997 by Ventana Press.

So you can expect more like this, including The Faces Behind Microsoft Visual Studio, which is already available. This is one of a series of looking-back posts I’ll be making timed to the 20th anniversary of Visual Studio.

Here’s my 1997 overview of the release of Visual InterDev 1.0, which was part of the very first version of Visual Studio. 20 years ago, I was heavily invested in Microsoft’s developer stack.

Microsoft visual studio code 1.0