Visual Studio Group Gets New GM

Published: September 19, 2007

by Alex Woodie

Microsoft shook up its developer organization late last week when it promoted Jason Zander to lead development of Visual Studio, its flagship development environment.

Zander, who previously was general manager of the .NET Framework group, took over the GM position for the Visual Studio group last Friday. Visual Studio is one of three groups in Microsoft's developer division. This includes the runtime group, which handles the common language runtime (CLR), the ASP.NET language, and the windows presentation foundation (WPF) APIs, and is headed by Scott Guthrie, and another group headed by Andrew Kass which develops the Visual Studio Team System.

All three development organizations are under the jurisdiction of S. Somasegar, corporate vice president of the developer division, which is a part of the Server and Tools Group in the company's Platforms and Services Division.

Zander announced the change in job description on his blog. Zander's first job will be shipping Visual Studio 2008. After that, he will focus on mobile technologies, Phoenix, C++, C#, VB, JavaScript, Office tools, Popfly, "and several groups doing some advanced work we aren't yet talking about," he says.