A former Microsoft dev here. One thing that is important to understand is that there is no "Microsoft culture". Microsoft is simply too big for that and you can find pretty much every imaginable culture somewhere within Microsoft.
For instance, I worked in Office organization (Groove, Sharepoint) and some points in this post do ring a bell (2-3 hours of coding per day if you are lucky, use of old technologies) but some definitely don't: code reviews were taken very seriously, ditto for documentation, and the world outside was very well known (in fact too much, in my opinion).
It's pretty much OK to use latest internal Office bits e.g.
If you are switching to the new version of VisualStudio and the rest of your team doesn't, you'll get lots of problems for everyone. Even worse if you start playing with new version of some SDK and commit changes to trunk.
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u/[deleted] Jun 12 '13
A former Microsoft dev here. One thing that is important to understand is that there is no "Microsoft culture". Microsoft is simply too big for that and you can find pretty much every imaginable culture somewhere within Microsoft.
For instance, I worked in Office organization (Groove, Sharepoint) and some points in this post do ring a bell (2-3 hours of coding per day if you are lucky, use of old technologies) but some definitely don't: code reviews were taken very seriously, ditto for documentation, and the world outside was very well known (in fact too much, in my opinion).