Random .NET Ramblings

Well, I have landed but before I talk about where let me tell you what I have been doing with myself. November 11th was technically my last day with Microsoft but the 6th was my hard deadline for completing all projects. The weekend of the 7th my son and I had a campout planned with the Webelos. This campout was not only a great bonding weekend with my son, but it proved to be very enlightening for me personally as well. I took the opportunity to speak with several of the Dad?s many who had experienced their own layoffs over the years. I learned a lot and I returned home with some new personal commitments to keep me busy during my transition.

These commitments included:

1. I would never eat lunch alone.
   • This commitment would allow me to work my professional networks and it turned out to be a great way to capitalize on a lot of free lunches.
2. I would read one non-technical book per day.
   • This was a huge thing for me. I just don?t do non-geek well but I really wanted to take the opportunity to stretch myself.
3. I would apply for one new job each day and talk to someone about a job every day.
   • This commitment slipped quickly as I knew what I would be doing fairly soon.

So how did I do?

With #1 I am happy to report except for one day I had lunch with someone every day. Okay, well yes, I am counting a few with my wife as ?with someone?. This goal was a lot of fun and did open up some interesting opportunities. I plan to continue this commitment at some level even while working. I hope to have lunch with someone outside my organization at least once a week but I will try for twice a week.

Commitment #2 was by far the most challenging. Not the reading part, but finding books that I wanted to read proved to be difficult. My goal was to read professional or personal development books but man, there are a lot of crap books out there! By far my favorite book was my reread of The 4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss. This book will remain nearby as I plan to read it often! Next was my reread of Getting Things Done by David Allen. This book sparked me to re-GTD myself and this time I did it in my home office. Wow, everyone needs to pick up a copy of this book and more importantly DO IT! I read many other books, so many I had to start going to the library as my wife did not like all of the Amazon boxes piling up. I will try to do a post on my favorites soon.

Well, with #3 I did a good job for the first week but as several offers seemed to come in quite quickly I spent my time focusing on them.

Now the big news and the reason for this post! I am now happily employed at Neudesic. w00t! While searching for a new employment opportunity I passed up several programming consulting offers in favor of looking for a company that met both my personal and professional goal to get back to being more product focused. I wanted to develop products.

Neudesic offered me quite an exciting job and an interesting title as well. I am now Director of Product Incubation where I will be responsible for the initial justification (product research proofs of concepts and initial implementation) of product ideas for Neudesic. Neudesic has already started to work on two different product concepts and I will immediately dive into these. I am super excited to have been given this opportunity and Neudesic has been incredibly supportive. The people I have met have been outstanding!

So, that is it? I am back working and again loving what I do! Thank you to all who had let me know you were thinking of me and who helped me find all the different opportunities.

It has been a short-down time but I can tell I will go stir-crazy quickly if I don't get back to working soon. The pace at Microsoft was so intense that having little to do has been a shock to my system. I still am not sure what I would like to do, but I am going to begin talking to people about possibilities.

I do know I what want is some place where I can have real impact. With my background, I am fortunate that I have been able to do so many things. At Microsoft I enjoyed that I was able to bring my diverse background to develop and execute programs and projects. I am now a strange hybrid developer, program manager and project manager with great presentation skills.

Suggestions?

It looks like Novell has made it easy for .NET developers to create and deploy Mono based applications to Linux. This should scare Microsoft quite a bit, one of Microsoft's big concerns is to win server market share on the internet. They have created the WebsitSpark program just try to attract PHP developers to deploy on Windows and here is Novell making it easy for .NET developers to deploy to Linux. Looks like there will be some interesting times ahead for Miguel and the MS relationship people.

Test, package .NET apps for Linux with Visual Studio add-in - Ars Technica

For the record I can?t see using Linux, Windows Server 2008 R2 has such good hosting tools now it would be much cheaper to Windows in the long run and at scale.

Today Microsoft announced another round of layoffs and I was included. It was totally unexpected and there was no explanation other than the (I am sure legally vetted) ?reorganize and restructure? answer. I am sure this is how they have handled past layoffs and if you look at the group I am in I can understand how the job I was doing was redundant, if I were management I could see selecting this position for removal. I had a counterpart doing the same job in NorCal and that is the market that Microsoft is more concerned with. I have looked at the current positions Microsoft has open in SoCal and decided not to apply as I would not be a good fit for them. So that leaves me with some thinking to do?

I will brush-up the resume but I really want to take some time to think about what?s next for me and my family. I am sure I will find many interesting opportunities and at least one that I will be excited about. My goal is to find something where I can make big contributions to ensure the success of an organization.

My network access and email will be shut off soon so you can reach me through this blog or use my gmail address or send a note on facebook or twitter @woodyp.

Thank you to all of the great people I was able to work with at Microsoft, I will look forward to seeing you all in the developer community soon.

@ritzy is not going to like this post but?

After the ASP.NET User Group the other night I went and had dinner with Mark Rosenberg and Tim McCarthy and I asked Tim if he was planning on attending PDC. The surprising answer I got was ?No why would I? I can get so much content online that I don?t need to take the time or spend the money to go to conferences any more.? (ok that is not an exact quite but it was close) he also pointed out that all the content from PDC will be available on line soon after a given session is done. Well now we have yet more ways to learn on line with The Channel 9 Learning Center from the site:

The Channel 9 Learning Center is the destination for free technical training on emerging Microsoft products and technologies. The Learning Center consists of a set of courses with each course including a set of videos, hands-on labs, and source code samples to get you up-to-speed quickly.

So if you are in to the bleeding edge stuff here is where you can get information about what Microsoft is up to.

Last night I was able to present to the San Diego ASP.NET Users Group about Visual Studio 2010 and after some difficulties in downloading the Beta 2 the day before I was able to show the latest Beta.

On the cool factor I think the editor Zoom was a hit and many of the new debug features were also a big hit. If you were there let me know what your best feature you saw was. There was just not enough time to go through everything, I did not get to show some of the cool demos around ASP.NET and site deployment. I have posted my slides to SildeShare and embedded to below but for more information checkout The 10-4 Show on Channel9 and the VS 2010 / .NET Framework 4.0 Training Kit.

Your crazy! Please please please stop it? it hurts for me to say that but it?s true. I have a long history with Visual Source Safe starting with it when it was a One Tree Software product and it rocked but we must recall this was 1992 or so when I started using it. Now it is so easy to get much better source control software there is little excuse for still using VSS.

And now we have announced a great alternative to VSS it?s TFS (Team Foundation Server). Yes I am hiding under my desk right now as I expect every one is about to throw something at me but let me explain. In TFS 2010 the team has made some big strides in how easy it is to setup and maintain. For full details you should read Brian Harry blog post on the subject TFS 2010 for SourceSafe Users the rest of his blog is pretty good as well ;).

Just in time for my presentation to the San Diego ASP.NET group tomorrow we have released the second beta to MSDN subscribers today and everyone can get it on the 21st.

Go get it! Visual Studio Beta 2 Page 

Microsoft Security Essentials was released a few days ago, it will help protect consumers against viruses, spyware and other malicious software. This comes from the work we have done with Forefront product family for corporate users so it?s quite robust. I had my father running the beta for quite some time now and he enjoyed the experience.

It?s about time we did this but I know we are going to have some major push back from other antivirus venders. The major players have a lot of other features to there products so they will still have customer demand and we have talked about this for some time so they would have had to be asleep at the wheal if they did not know this was coming.

Let me know what you think I would suggest uninstalling what ever antivirus product you have and then install Microsoft Security Essentials.