Seema Ramchandani: From Brain Science to Silverlight

Posted By: Charles | Aug 6th @ 11:33 AM

Seema Ramchandani is the performance and controls PM on the Silverlight team.  Seema talks about how cool Silverlight is including it being FREE, runs on the Mac, and leverages existing developer skills but she also tells us how she moved from being in the business of brains to software.  Yes, brains!  Before joining Microsoft almost 5 years ago, Seema was getting her master’s degree at Brown in the area of brain sciences, which is the convergence of applied math, computer science, and neuro science.  (Is she a smarty pants or what?!)  Specifically she was working on implanting chips into the motor cortex of humans so locked-in patients can control a cursor.  Pretty cool, eh?  Find out more by watching her WM_IN interview with Charles and Ritzy. 

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#Aug 6th @ 1:18 PM
dnjake
dnjake
I don't think Charles got the value proposition quite right.  Presumably, the value proposition to Microsoft is writing Silverlight applications with Visual Studio on Windows.  Presumably nobody is going to offer a development environment on the Mac.  The value to the developer from having Silverlight applications run on IE, FireFox, and Safari on Windows and Mac is getting reach with their applications.  Presumably this feature is essential if you want to attract developers to proprietary frameworks that run over the web.  The situation with Moonlight is more interesting.  Presumably, Mono will have its own development environment and also the potential to run Silverlight applications on the Linux desktop.  It will be interesting to see how that works out and what kind of mixing and matching there is between Microsoft developed tools/appllications and those developed on Linux.
#Aug 6th @ 1:48 PM
Charles
Charles
Indeed Smiley I'm not in marketing. I do think we want devs using VS+Windows for obvious reasons. I also think it would be cool if VS ran on other OSes...
C
#Aug 6th @ 4:29 PM
La Bomba
La Bomba
Silverlight is the coolest thing MS has done in a long time, and seemed to have gotten it right.

You can see why with the brain power behind the project Smiley
#Aug 6th @ 9:40 PM
JellyBox
JellyBox
That's actually an interesting issue. On one hand, when you put in the good work to build Visual Studio, IIS and other tools, you deserve to attach a price tag to them. On the other, you have those open source guys who fire up a linux, get an Apache, MySql, Eclipse and some other free framework, and then they can start developing. In comparison, your price tag does become a hurdle . I know there are Express editions but they are not full-featured dev environment.