Clemens Vasters, a longtime "friend" of Microsoft, will soon be joining the software giant to work on the upcoming communications platform for the Vista operating system.

Vasters, who is the co-founder and chief technology officer at Microsoft partner Newtelligence AG, of Korschenbroich, Germany, will join Microsoft in Redmond, Wash., as the Community Program Manager on the WCF (Windows Communication Foundation), also known as Indigo.

Vasters will assume his new role as of February 1, sources said.

"Microsoft is continuing to somehow lure the best and the brightest in the different fields to come and join the mother ship—even when they have been successfully running their own companies," said a source familiar with Vasters' situation.

Click here to read about Microsoft's recent hiring of a Shared Source Initiative chief.

"This is a great gain for MS, and should prove to be a big plus for the MS developer community as well."

Vasters has been close to Microsoft for some time. He has been one of a "posse" of .Net software experts that includes Microsoft software architect Don Box, Juval Lowy, chief architect at IDesign Inc., and others in a power clique.

In his blog earlier this month, Vasters wrote about support for REST (Representational State Transfer) and POX (Plain Old XML) in Indigo.

"A little bit more than half a year ago, I got invited to a meeting at Microsoft in Redmond and discussed with Steve Swartz, Yasser Shohoud and Eugene Osovetsky how to implement POX and REST support for Indigo," he said.

In addition, Vasters wrote a two-part post on "Teaching Indigo to do REST/POX."

This article was originally published on eWEEK.com.