Damien Watkins is a Program Manager on the Visual C++ team. His main area of interest is the design and implementation of component architectures. His first book, co-authored with Mark Hammond and Brad Abrams, "Programming in the .NET Environment" describes the architecture and goals and of the .NET Framework. Prior to joining the C++ Team Damien was a member of the External Research Office (ERO) at Microsoft Research Cambridge (MSRC). The ERO's goal is to extend the research scope of MSRC outside of the traditional computer science domain. Damien mainly worked in two of the ERO's programs:

• New Computing Paradigms
• Computational Sciences

Before joining MSR, Damien founded and managed his own software consulting company called Project 42. Before starting Project 42 Damien was a lecturer at the School of Computer Science and Software Engineering at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. His primary area of research was distributed component architectures. At Monash University he taught subjects at both the postgraduate and undergraduate levels. He has also lectured for a semester at Uppsala University (Sweden) and King Mongkut's Institute of Technology (Thailand).

Component architectures that provide language interoperability have always held a keen interest for Damien. Damien's PhD thesis, titled "Adding Contracts to Interface Definition Languages", dealt with improving the semantic quality of component architectures. Damien's best known publication from this area was with Antoine Beugnard, Jean-Marc Jezequel and Noel Plouzeau, a paper titled Making Components Contract Aware.

Damien has also written a paper titled "Handling Language Interoperability with the Microsoft .NET Framework", briefly describing how language interoperability is achieved within the Common Language Runtime. He has also co-authored a paper with Sebastian Lange titled "An Overview of Security in the .NET Framework" which describes some of the security features in the .NET Framework.

Damien has presented tutorials, seminars and workshops on COM/DCOM, CORBA and the .NET Framework at numerous locations, including ECOOP 2004, OOPSLA 2003, OOPSLA 2002, SIGCSE 2002, the Microsoft Research Faculty Summit 2001 (USA), ObjectWorld 1998 (Australia), TOOLS Pacific (Australia), TOOLS Europe (France), TOOLS East Europe (Bulgaria) and TOOLS Asia (China).

Damien and his family are now enjoying the relocation from Melbourne to Cambridge and he is eager to familiarize himself with as much of EMEA as time permits. Damien is also looking for a great Korean restaurant within walking distance of home.