About Wade

Hello,

I joined Microsoft in February 1992 in Product Support Services, helping customers with Windows 3.0.  Over the next 3 1/2 years, I supported most of our end user operating systems and various corporate products like Microsoft Mail.  In 1995, I moved over to Developer Support where I ended up in networking support.  During that time, this HTTP thing started catching on and I started playing with a beta of something called Internet Information Server 1.0.

After I set up my first web server, I wanted to put a hit counter on my pages.  At the time, the only way I could find to do it was to add an IMG tag to an exe file on the bottom of the page.  This would insert an image of some numbers, which was not at all what I wanted.  After doing some digging, I found an API called ISAPI (ASP didn't exist yet) that allowed me to dynamically create a page with whatever text I wanted, including hit counter data.  In a fairly short amount of time, I ended up being Developer Support's ISAPI expert.  When my PSS career started getting past 5 years, I decided that I wanted to move to a product group and help develop and ship software.

The IIS product team had impressed me as being one of the more customer focused groups at Microsoft.  In November 1997, just before the IIS 5 project started, I joined the IIS team as the new ISAPI tester.  At the end of the IIS 5 project, I moved from test into development.  IIS 6 was a complete rewrite from previous versions of IIS.  Although I participated in various parts of the IIS core, my main contribution was to write the ISAPI extension interface.  In addition to my core work, I did a number of side projects, the most visible of which was UrlScan, which I both designed and wrote.  The purpose was to address a number of high-visibility security issues that were prevalent at the time.

After we shipped IIS 6, there were some major organizational changes to the IIS team.  In the shuffle, I ended up in my current assignment as a Development Lead.  In this role, I am responsible for "security" and "performance".  I put these things in quotes because they are not actual parts of the product that can be spec'ed and written.  Rather, these are engineering efforts that have my team collaborating with others to identify and address potential issues with the product.  In addition to security and performance, I am responsible for servicing all previous versions of IIS.  This means that my team is responsible for handling any QFE requests, and much of the work that goes into service packs for IIS.

Outside of work, I have a wife, two kids, a dog and two cats.  My hobbies include flying radio controlled airplanes and amateur astronomy.  I am a licensed pilot, and am a native to Seattle (one of the few at Microsoft.)  And I don't like coffee.