.NET Community Q&A with Phil Haack

Welcome to the first installment of our .NET community Q&A series.The intent of these articles is to introduce some prominent bloggers to the DZone community.

Today we catch up with Phil Haack, ASP.NET MVC maven. Phil was the CTO and co-founder of VelocIT before joining Microsoft last year. He remains the leader of the Subtext open source blogging engine project as well. Be sure to check out Phil's blog, You've Been HAACKED, to find out more about him.

Where do you call home? For now, Bellevue, WA.

Where do you work and what do you do there? I work at the big blue monster, Microsoft. I’m a Program Manager on the ASP.NET team working on the ASP.NET MVC project.

When did you decide to pursue a career in software? When I graduated from college, I was in enough debt that I thought I would take a job for a year to pay down the debt, before joining a graduate program in Mathematics to accrue more debt. With my math degree in hand, I thought that was the natural thing to do. At the time, I figured mathematicians either become actuaries, or professors of math. Once I got a taste of the fun and fulfillment involved in writing code and building these creations out of pure thought matter, I never went back. This was around 1997.

What was your first computer?  TRS-80 Color Computer. I still have it, but I don’t know if it works or not anymore.

What is your favorite gadget at the moment? My XBox 360 ever since the new Netflix integration. We never watch television shows live, instead waiting for the good ones to show up on Netflix. Now we can just stream those shows over the net.

What is your .NET language of choice?  C#, followed by IronRuby.

What is your all-time favorite video game? Gears of War 2, which I’m playing right now. Oblivion and Ultima IV are close runners up.

What is the best music to code by? Trance, Drum N Bass, Progressive, etc… Mainly electronic music with very little if any vocals.

What is your favorite programming book? It’s hard to choose one, but Code Complete had the most impact on me when I was just starting out. It really inspired me to treat software development as a craft.

M&Ms: Plain or Peanut? Peanut, all the way!