Chris likes to write code and has a strong interest in Web services, and distributed and real-time systems. He spent the decade prior to joining Microsoft working for a series of start-up companies (B2B/e-commerce, voice biometrics and physical layer network switching) using a variety of technologies in real time and business system development. For the first five years out of college Chris raised havoc in the United States Navy as an engineering officer on a nuclear power ship, the USS Virginia, that was a total immersion experience in systems engineering (and, well, maybe a teensy bit of entertainment in between)—an education that is very useful to this day.