Please join me in welcoming Aaron Stebner and David Fleischman to the Media Center Platform team.

Those of you familiar with Aaron know he is incredibly passionate about our customer experiences which you can plainly see in his blog -- he is a posting machine! To quote a Group Program Manager, he 'absorbs technical information like a sponge.' In the brief time I have spent working with Aaron so far, it's not just any sponge, but a freakishly large sponge about the size of a compact car. Aaron will be focusing on our Media Center Add In platform.

David Fleischman brings a wealth of knowlege on Project Management to our team. David played a prominent role in helping us get Emerald (long name: Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 Update Rollup 2) out the door. He ran our daily status meeting for months on that project. Here is the best way to describe what he did for us during Emerald: Chief Cat Herder (CCH). Keeping all the strong personalities focused on shipping a great product is no small feat. David will be focusing on the WinFX platform integration into Media Center for Windows Vista as well as driving production of the SDK (yet another cat herding exercise).

You can expect some great blog posts about our platform over on Media Center Sandbox from these guys in the coming weeks and months.

Welcome guys -- we are gonna have a ton of fun this year!

And that makes 4 of the 6 bloggers who are on the Media Center team (Aaron, David, Michael and Me) a part of the platform team. I hope Peter and Matt don't feel left out.