Welcome to my blog!

Hi,

My name is Chris Riccio and I am the Test Manager for the ASP.NET team at Microsoft. The core focus of my blog is to provide the ASP.NET community a viewpoint on ASP.NET features from the Test Team’s perspective as well as provide greater visibility into the Test discipline at Microsoft. Hopefully I can provide some insight into what it means to be a tester and why some ASP.NET features might behave differently than you would expect.

A bit about my history at Microsoft:

I joined Microsoft in March, 1997 as an SDET working on IIS 4.0 which would ship as part of the Windows NT 4.0 Option Pack, and I have remained a part of the groups working on Microsoft’s Web Platform ever since. I was initially responsible for testing the Personal Web Server for Windows 95 and later took on testing of ASP including Session State, Data Access and some of the additional controls like AdRotator.

Shortly after shipping IIS 5.0 in Windows 2000, I had an opportunity to move onto a team looking to revolutionize the way developers write web pages, and became the third tester on the project that would become ASP.NET. My primary focus was on the features that would make up parts of the core of ASP.NET, such as HttpModules, Session State, Application Deployment and Configuration. As the project grew I was able to take a role as an SDET Lead responsible for the team testing all of the core components of ASP.NET.

I remained in that role for several releases (.NET Framework 1.0, 1.1, 2.0) leading our Core Infrastructure and Application Services testing as well as our Stress and Performance testing efforts.

In the later stages of the .NET Framework 2.0 product cycle, the IIS team rejoined our group, and the scope of features that my team owned grew to include some early IIS 7 integration points. Over time, we’d realize that since the products were on different schedules, it made more sense to keep folks focused on one of them at a time instead of both, so I took on an SDET Lead role for IIS7. The features that my team owned covered the Administration and Configuration of IIS and Health Monitoring related areas.

Once IIS 7 officially became part of Windows Vista, which was a major accomplishment for the team, I jumped for an opportunity driving the testing efforts on a project within the ASP.NET team that was just getting underway that would eventually be called Atlas. I was the only tester (from a discipline specific sense) working on Atlas for our first release at the September 2005 PDC.  I took on the Test Manager role for the ASP.NET team in April 2006 as we were planning the feature set for the next .NET Framework release called Orcas.