Hey Felix, I will be joining Microsoft this summer ( Visual Studio Team ). Any Idea how one can move to working on Open Source stuff like you are doing.
I work at MSFT too, and have been involved with open sourcing a major project, called Bond[1]. I'm happy to chat about this offline, if you like. Email is in the profile.
The short answer is that there are divisions in the company with a direct imperative to open source things, so if your manager is willing to encourage this (easy enough to figure out), the answer is often yes. Like almost every company, we tend to open source tools but not products (e.g., yes to Orleans, but no to the game it supports, Halo), so from there it's a matter of finding a group that has such tools, or is open to developing them.
Felix (who works for my old boss -- hi Felix!) is a special case. He works for a team called strategic engagements, whose job (I hope he'll correct me if I'm wrong) is specifically to engage with the public, usually on their own terms, which often involves non-MSFT tech. _That_ is an uncommon job, but if you want to talk to people in the group, just ping me when you get here and I'll put you in touch with the dev manager for the group.
Hey! @hausdorff (Hi Alex!) below already commented on it, but feel free to hit me up. We do things with devdiv and there are a bunch of people who're into releasing things - just hit me up via email (felix.rieseberg@microsoft.com), I'm happy to chat about it!