Bertrand
Le Roy

Cognitive search is an AI feature in Azure Search, used to extract text from images, blobs, and other unstructured data sources - enriching the content to make it more searchable in an Azure Search index. Extraction and enrichment are implemented through cognitive skills attached to an indexing pipeline.

Project Details:

• Web site: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/search/cognitive-search-concept-intro
• Categories: cloud
• Date: 2019 - present

The Xamarin team at Microsoft builds an open source mobile platform for building Android, iOS, mac, watchOS, and tvOS apps with .NET. I worked on improving the Xamarin Forms developer experience in Visual Studio for Windows and mac.

Project Details:

• Web site: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/xamarin/
• Categories: community, open-source
• Date: 2017 - 2019

At Microsoft, I've shipped features in all releases of ASP.NET between 1.1 and 4.0. I also launched ASP.NET AJAX, and contributed to Microsoft's adoption of jQuery. I worked on .NET Core, Microsoft's next generation development platform. My contributions, as a Software Design Engineer, Lead Software Developer, and Senior Program Manager, include strong advocacy for the team to embrace open source. I co-founded the Orchard open-source CMS and convinced the ASP.NET team to transfer its ownership entirely to the community. I started The Week in .NET and the On .NET show.

Project Details:

• Web site: http://dot.net
• Categories: community, open-source
• Date: 2003 - 2011, then 2015 - 2017

Orchard is one of the most important Content Management Systems for ASP.NET. Fully open-source, built, governed, and managed by the community, Orchard is now powering more than a hundred thousand web sites, including Halo, AMC Theatres, and Toyota. I'm one of the founders of the Orchard project. We convinced Microsoft to not only start and fund the project, but also to let the community own it. Since then, I've been contributing code, design, and documentation, I've been elected Benevolent Dictator two years in a row, and I've been sitting on the steering committee every year. I've been advising many companies and community members on how best to build their web sites with Orchard.

Project Details:

• Web site: http://orchardproject.net
• Categories: open-source, cms, community
• Date: September 2011 - Present

I started building DecentCMS in October 2014 to teach myself Node.js in depth. Having built two CMS before, I know the domain pretty well, and that enabled me to distill the concept to a pure composition engine. My first objective with DecentCMS is to build a project for myself, with no compromise, and to have as much fun as possible along the way. The project already has hundreds of test cases, and extensive documentation. I eat my own dogfood, by using DecentCMS to power this web site, as well as the sites for Decent Consulting, and of course decentcms.org. The source code for DecentCMS is available on Github, and constitutes a great way to check out my coding skills.

Project Details:

• Web site: http://decentcms.org
• Categories: open-source, cms
• Date: October 2014 - Present

In 2011, I founded Nwazet with my friend Fabien Royer with the goal of building cool, innovative hardware products. There, I designed many laser-cut enclosures for the Raspberry Pi and other devices. From extremely functional boxes such as our camera boxes, to our fun "head cases", all of our products featured robustness, precision, and build quality, for an affordable price. Laser-cutting was chosen because it enabled us to modify designs at any time, while enabling production to scale cost-effectively to a strong demand as needed. If the topic of hardware enclosures interests you, I recommend this episode of Hanselminutes where I discuss it in depth with Scott Hanselman.

Project Details:

• Web site: http://www.modmypi.com/raspberry-pi/cases/nwazet-cases/
• Categories: hardware
• Date: August 2011 - October 2014

The PIX-6T4 was the first product designed by Nwazet. It's an open-source do-it-yourself gaming console that is designed so that the user should be able to understand any part of it. It comes with a dev kit that you can use to create your own games using C#, in addition to the games that come with it (Pong, Asteroids). Fans have built PIX-6T4 versions of Snake, Tetris, and a racing game. The minimalist design stems from the belief that technical constraints breed creativity: it's amazing how it is possible to distill simple video games to 8x8 pixel versions that are actually fun to play.

Project Details:

• Web site: http://pix6t4.com
• Categories: hardware, game, community, open-source
• Date: 2011

Nwazet Commerce and Orchard Core Commerce are online shop modules for Orchard and Orchard Core. I originally built Nwazet Commerce as an open-source project to power the hardware startup Nwazet. Since then, I've grown its feature set and its community considerably. The project is now the main commerce module for Orchard, it has its own user-contributed extensions, as well as many active forks. The Orchard Core Commerce module is a complete rewrite of Nwazet Commerce for Orchard Core, that is currently in its early development phase.

Project Details:

• Web site: https://github.com/OrchardCMS/OrchardCore.Commerce
• Categories: cms, community, open-source
• Date: 2012 - Present

MagnitSite was my first CMS. I built it to industrialize Magnitude's site building, and to better let its customers manage their own data. It was probably the first CMS on ASP.NET. I built its multi-tenancy, syndication, content versioning, validation workflows, custom content types built from parts, a cross-browser visual HTML editor (those were not common at all in 2000), localization, search, themes, access control, forums, mailing-lists, and external database integration features.

Project Details:

• Categories: cms
• Date: 2000 - 2003

F.R.E.E. (which stands for Funny Risky Evil Escape) was my third video game. This one was developed with my friend Fabien Royer, and three illustrators. The game runs on Atari 8-bit computers. It's a precursor to point and click adventures that stands somewhere between those and Infocom text adventures. I wrote it entirely in 6502 assembly language, with a dynamic module loading system that enables the game to be very rich and varied despite strong memory constraints. I also designed and built an automatic map that enables fast travel, as well as in-memory game saves, to avoid those nasty, and unfairly frequent deaths. It fits on five floppy disks, mostly occupied by 100 compressed 160x192 four-color full-screen images. The game was a big success in France, where it sold thousands of copies. It can still be experienced today using an Atari 8-bit emulator.

Project Details:

• Web site: http://www.atarimania.com/game-atari-400-800-xl-xe-free-funny-risky-evil-escape_26018.html
• Categories: game
• Date: 1985

Lunar Lander was my first video game. I started building it when I got my first computer at 10, a TI-99/4A. Two years later, I started selling the completed game. It was quite successful, and I sold thousands of copies, reaching about 30% of the French market for TI games, without even accounting for pirated copies. The game was inspired by the vector-based Lunar Lander arcade game. My take was a more modern version, with five different environments, and 25 very challenging levels.
Shortly after Lunar Lander, I started working on another game, Lunar Jumper, which was very similar in gameplay to Moon Patrol.

Project Details:

• Categories: game
• Date: 1980 - 1984