As most of you probably have figured out from my last blog post, I’m at Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond. I have a summer internship here this summer, and will be working here until the end of August.

The whole story started in early March this spring. I applied for the internship through Microsoft Norway and sent in my resume. In end of March I went to Paris and was interviewed by three people from Microsoft in Redmond, one recruiter, one PM and one tester.

I was asked to solve a programming problem about finding the lowest common parent of two nodes in a binary tree, and then to write the code to solve it on paper. I was also asked a brainteaser and to give examples on how I would test different things, like a table.

Right before Easter I received a job offer as a Software Design Engineer in Test (SDET) on the WinFS team, so here I am.

My first impression of Microsoft is that it is a huge company, and the main campus here in Redmond is quite large. The work environment here is very nice – everybody is nice and you don’t need to wear a suit at work – you can wear whatever you want. The campus is nice – nice buildings and lots of trees and vegetation – almost like a large park.

As some of you may have noticed, WinFS has been cancelled as its own launch vehicle. What that means is that WinFS will not ship as a separate software component, but the technologies developed will be integrated into the next version of SQL Server and ADO. More information can be found on the WinFS Team Blog. I think is it a little sad that we won’t see WinFS shipped, but the vision of a richer storage in Windows is very much alive, as Quentin says.

As WinFS will not be shipped, I will be put on another team, but more on that later.