Hi Zeo -

I've always wanted to know more about the patterns and practice group at Microsoft.
 
I've read many of their white papers and prescriptive guidance papers but I've always wondered about who exactly makes up the group (are they all deep CS PHD research candidates?)  because they seem to publish scary smart stuff that has really great technical breath and depth. 

I'm a product manager in the p&p team - wow, glad you like the stuff we're producing! We're a pretty diverse team (in both experience and culture), but the overwhelming majority of us have spend considerable time working out in the "real world" on enterprise customer projects.

We also try very hard to be transparent in our processes and to participate in community forums - it's very important that we're grounded in reality, and we need customers help to do this! If you want to find out more about our team, our blogs are a great place to start - see http://msdn.microsoft.com/practices/Comm/TeamBlogs/default.aspx. We are also involved in GotDotNet community sites and we do webcasts and events as often as we can - so hopefully some of us will cross paths with you eventually Smiley

Thanks again for your support

Tom Hollander
http://blogs.msdn.com/tomholl