Selling developers on .Net
C|Net | at | by Mike
He's hardly as well-known as Bill Gates but Eric Rudder will have more influence over the future of Microsoft's bet-the-company .Net software strategy than his more famous boss. Rudder, Microsoft's 35-year-old senior vice president of developer and platform evangelism, is in charge of enlisting software developers to the cause--and keeping them happy. That's a big job because, simply put, without a large corps of developers behind it, .Net will remain a pipe dream.
It also means Rudder and his team need to convince software developers to support .Net by buying Microsoft's Visual Studio.Net software development tools as well as the company's family of e-business software for building and running their applications. So far, this remains a work in progress. Gates last week gave Microsoft mixed grades. While he called the release of Visual Studio.Net in February a major milestone, he acknowledged that the technology had been slow to catch on.