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Hi all. My name is Christophe Lauer. I was born in August 1967 and I live in France. You're right, I'm 36. I work at Microsoft France for a bit more than two years now. Let's now have a quick look at my past experience in the computing world.
I first put my hands at the age of 16 on a Tandy TRS-80 Model 1. Since then, I've always had at least one computer at home. Today, my Computer Museum has more than 35 pieces ;-)
I started working in 1991 as a Unix developer for a small consulting shop that also wrote a Software Engeneering application called "Aetius 451". Basically, Aetius was a kind of "super debugger" running by building a behavior model of applications, based on execution traces. The tool could do regression testing, test coverage, debugging, etc... That was a really good experience for me. I usually say that this is during these years that I learned 90% of what I know today about software development and software engineering, and thanks to some of my colleagues who really helped me getting more skilled. Aetius was an X11 Motif application, developed with Emacs as the IDE, and compiled using GCC. Our main development platform was SunOS 4.1.x running onmodest SparcStation1 (I have some SparcStations now in my Computer Museum like this dual CPU SparcStation10 sitting besides my main PC). The C source code was ported to Solaris, HP-UX, AIX and DG-UX. Each port required a lot of work. I can tell you that C language portability on Unix is a myth ;-) The last project I worked on in this period was a Client-Server tool, on OS/2 and Windows 3.1 using a 4GL tool called NSDK and NSDK/2 (aka Natstar). I installed my first Linux on a 486 sx-20 with a 40 Mb disk at that time. It was a Sunsite archive, running kernel 0.99pl18 (by now, my prefered distrib is Debian). I had no CD-Rom drive in this 486, so I had to "rawrite" something like 40 floppy disks ;-) I finally bought a Sony CDU-33a unit for this machine.
Then I left in 1994 for a larger software shop, and stayed there another 3 years or so. I worked mainly on a large Unix project. This company sucked. I felt I was not paid enough for the work I did and the time I spent there each day. So I left and joined "SQL Ingenierie", now called SQLI. I stayed 3 or 4 years at SQLI. The last year, I worked for the R&D part of the company called "TechMetrix". We did there a really good job about new technologies, writing reports and studies on development tools, web application servers and Open Source software. During that period, I was a great PHP fan and I co-authored a PHP book in April 2000. I also wrote a PHP tutorial that is still hosted on the Linux France web site ;-) I had some press interview in which I was not really tender with Java...
Less than six month later, I first heard about .NET from my contacts at MS France who just came back from PDC 2000 and I started a great love story with .NET, that's still as strong today. I wanted to share my enthusiasm about .NET with as many people as I could reach, so I decided to create the first news website dedicated to .NET in French: DotNET-fr was born. I started writing articles about .NET - like this one published in January 2001 - and began talking of .NET to my customers.
Then, I finally moved to Microsoft France in October 2001, and joined the .NET division - now called the "Developers and Platform Evangelism" division - as a .NET Evangelist for ISVs. That's no doubt fo best thing in my short carreer. Besides my every day job, I'm still involved in the Community, through our ".NET Unplugged Beer Meetings" and other more serious events like the French ASP.NET Roadshow, meeting with MVPs and participating to various local events.
For those who wonder where this CLaueR blog name comes from, just notice that my name is Christophe Lauer and that clauer is my email alias at Microsoft. CLaueR contains "CLR" which is rather fine for a .NET Evangelist. But you know, it was my destiny. Back in early 90's when I started as a Unix developer, my username was "clr" ;-)) It was written!
Oh, and in case you're wondering what I look like, here's a picture of me - cheers - and here's another one which is not more serious :)