Microsoft’s Jason Zander has announced
that Erich Gamma will be joining the Visual Studio team as a Microsoft Distinguished Engineer
Gamma is one of the “Gang of Four” who shook up software development back in 1994 with the book Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software.
The other authors are Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson and John Vlissides.
Gamma has previously been associated with Java rather than .NET. He was co-developer with Kent Beck of the JUnit unit test framework, and also worked on the Eclipse tools platform and at IBM Rational on application lifecycle management (ALM).
It is a prestigious hire and I would expect Gamma’s influence on Visual Studio to be a positive one, especially in areas like software quality, refactoring and ALM.
… another next big thing 🙂