Name:
Will Buffington

Title/Product:
Support Escalation Engineer, Expression Design

What inspires you?
Inspiration for me comes from a lot of places: books by Michael Crichton, Arthur C. Clarke, Doug Adams (RIP guys); brand new issues of Wired! magazine; a tall glass of fine ale; sometimes even from the cool little kid shows that my daughter (age 2) likes to watch. My wife is a huge inspiration to me, daily. I cannot imagine where I would be without her. Good thing she agreed to marry me as Texas has some pretty harsh stalking laws.

How did you choose to work on this team with this product?
Ever since I first heard about Expression Studio, I was intrigued. I had bought and used many drawing programs, including Paint Shop Pro, PhotoShop, Bryce 3D and Microsoft PhotoDraw. I interned as a graphic artist at Southwest Texas State for a semester. I had also been tinkering around with Expression Blend and, as you know, Expression Design was created to work hand-in-hand with Blend. So, when I heard about the position opening to support Expression Design, I jumped on the chance to become a part of the team and support this awesome product.

What's your favorite feature? Why?
Well, one of my favorite features I can't talk about yet. To date, however, the Slice Tool is by far the best addition made to Expression Design. The new export dialog in version 2 was also a much-needed and very big improvement to workflows between Design and Blend.

How long have you been a Microsoftie?
I've been full-time with Microsoft since October of 1999, though I was supporting Microsoft by buying its products ever since the release of Windows 95. Windows 95 was the first operating system that truly transformed the desktop.

How do you like to spend your time outside of work?
I've a two-year-old daughter and a terrific wife who take the majority of my time outside of work. When I do have time to myself, I enjoy the XBox 360, writing code in Visual Studio 2008 just for fun (yes, I said just for fun!) and still doing some graphic design, mostly with Photoshop and Bryce 5 3D, again just for fun.

Anything else you'd like to share with the community?
Yes, brush your teeth daily. Otherwise someone that you are around is smelling your breath and trying to get away from you.

Links:
http://blogs.msdn.com/xdesignsupport/default.aspx