Hello my name is Arturo Toledo.  I’m a product manager on the UX Platform & Tools team (marketing). I consider myself a designer. I studied architecture (as in house, buildings) and then found doing interactive design was a better business :)  so I started relearning stuff. I say relearning because when I was a kid (a nerdy kid I guess) I used to do some BASIC and then QuickBasic 4.5.  It was then that I became a Microsoft fan.  I liked to create games. This is like in late 80’s. I would draw my game characters in an IBM drawing tool called Storyboard? I think that was the name… and then would draw those things with BASIC code. It was fun times. When doing games I realized that what I liked was designing the games and not necessarily coding so started spending more time doing cartoons or designing game levels. I dropped computers for a while (during HighSchool… you know how it works ) and then when I was about to pick my major for college we had this assignment in High School to design our own house and create a model of it. I loved it… it was like design that I liked. Back in ‘94 I remember looking in studying Graphic Design but after some research I found “designers” didn’t earn a lot of money and their area of influece was pretty narrow so I decided to study architecture which was “broader” in scope and had a good mix of functional and aesthetic concepts. I had some very fun years studying architecture. I learn a bunch of visualization related tools like Photoshop, 3D Studio Max and Macromedia Director. Little by little I started getting more work as an interactive designer than an architect. There was this chamber of commerce which asked me to create a Company Directory… this was the first interactive “something” that I was to create in like 10 years. This time it wasn’t QuickBasic but Director. So I got a book, learned Lingo and in a week I was coding again like in those good ol’ childish geeky days :)  Lingo was very easy.  From there it was all interactive design for me. I found interactive design allowed me to be as expressive as I always wanted to be but also required me with some more functional/geeky like approach to projects. It was the perfect balance between design and development. I got to Flash eventually but I would only use it to create my UIs and then would use Director to write the apps. It wasn’t until almost when I joined Microsoft in 2005 that I started using Flash for the actual apps. BTW, most of my work focused on DVDs and at the end I started doing websites as well. Director started lagging behind and Flash had this things like Zinc which allowed you to create desktop apps. I find it interesting to see how much we hear about rich desktop apps these days when people have been able to build such rich desktop apps for many many years with Zinc, Screenweaver or Jugglor. The difference of course is that these days, big software companies like Microsoft or Adobe beleive in the potential of these rich desktop apps. After Director stopped being enough for me I looked for my “next rich desktop” platform. Flash via these SWF2EXE libraries was one but then I discovered “Avalon” now WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation). I still remember back in Novemeber 2003 when visiting the MSDN site (not sure why I visited MSDN since it had nothing for designers but there I was…) that I saw what had been announced at PDC 2003. I got so excited… honestly I had “no clue” what this was all about I just remember reading about Microsoft creating this API (I didn’t know what and API was) for vectors, bitmaps, animations, audio, video and 3D… My first thought was: “Yes! I will finally be able to use Visual Studio as my next Director”. I had tried to learn .NET for a couple years and as a designer I found hard… I also got discouraged because Windows Forms is so ugly!!!… I couldn’t have any of the richness you had with Director or Flash. But this “Avalon” or WPF was a totally different thing… It changed the game. It enabled me to do what ever I wanted with .NET UIs and that was good news. I kept track of WPF and started reading blogs here and there. Apparently there was a leak of info years ago about something called ‘Sparkle’ which some tagged a”Flash Killer”… Back then when I didn’t work for Microsoft, “Sparkle” was the “Flash Killer” for me since I didn’t know the truth :). I also read about a company called Creature House having been acquired by Microsoft. I went into CH site and they a very cool little tool called Expression. I started posting everywhere I could, that little Expression tool was “Sparkle”! hehe… pretty funny now that I think about it. Anyway, one of those days I met Forest while being online and from there things started happening and so I joined Microsoft. When I joined I discovered the truth about this thing called “Sparkle” and things became even more interesting… I should narrate this in future posts. Cheers!