CodeMash is coming up faster than I want to think about on January 18 and 19th!

CodeMash is a unique event in that we are bringing together the .NET, Java, Ruby, PHP, Perl and Python communities to see what we can learn from each other. As a .NET guy, I'm planning on attending the other technology's sessions so that I can learn more about then and bring good ideas back to the .NET world. It should be a fun time to be had by all involved.

The other extremely cool thing is that it's at the Kalahari Resort and indoor water park. In January, that's a great place to be.

All of this is a fantastic bargain if you sign up by 11/30 and stay at the resort. It's $99.00 for the early bird registration and $88.00 a night for the resort. The full registration is $149.00 if you don't want to stay at the resort or if you miss the 11/30 date.

Check out the site for a lot more information.

I know that there are a lot of choices out there and rather than just picking one or going off of one or two people's opinion - I thought I'd just ask on my blog what your opinion is...

Feel free to comment on this in the comments or send me an email with your comments.

Working at Microsoft so far is a trip! I’ve been warmly welcomed by a tremendous number of people that I have known for years as well as many that I have meet only virtually through conference calls and emails over the past 2 weeks. I’ve also heard from a ton of people throughout the US and the rest of the world sending their congratulations.
A lot of what I’ve been doing is training on all of the internal policies, infrastructure and learning all about this fantastic company that I’ve joined. It’s amazing how big this company is. 70,000+ employees and growing.
(In fact, they are actively looking for 3 more Architects for the Breadth team with Central Region DPE. If you are in the Central Region but not in the Heartland District (that’s mine) and you’re interested in applying for one of those 3 architect positions – feel free to email me and I’ll pass you’re contact information to the appropriate people.)
It’s starting to get exciting as I’m starting to get engaged with customer and partners. It’s very cool getting to promote and to work with some really exciting technologies with .NET 3.0 coming out next month. More to come on these technologies coming soon.

I had the great pleasure of being on .NET Rocks speaking about SQL Everywhere and a whole lot more! I really should have gotten them a better photo - but such is life.

http://www.dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?showID=202

Download: GrokTalk-10DevToolsIn10Minutes.ppt

I wanted to publically apologize to Jennifer Marsman for not mentioning her in the announcement to my new job. She is the Depth Developer Evangelist for the Heartland District. She deals with a lot of bigger accounts in the Heartland District and is a ton smarter than me, Drew Robbins and a lot of us other Breadth Evangelists...

For proof that she's smarter - check out her patent:

http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PG01&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=%2220060074902%22.PGNR.&OS=DN/20060074902&RS=DN/20060074902

After several good years working with SRT Solutions and the good people there (Bill Wagner and Dianne Marsh as business partners and John Hopkins, Patrick Steele, Darrell Hawley, Alex Gheith and Martin Shoemaker as sub-contractors) I’ve gotten an opportunity that I can’t pass up.

I am joining Microsoft as an Architect Evangelist.

I am not going to be moving from my happy home in Manchester, MI. My office will be in Southfield, MI and I will be covering the Heartland District (Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee). While Darryl Hogan and Jon Box are Depth Architect Evangelists, I’ll be a Breadth Architect Evangelist. What that means is that they will be spending a lot of time with a few clients while my focus is much broader and community based. As the title suggests, my job will be to meet with and evangelize to architects throughout the district. A large part of my job will be to cultivate the architectural community the way that Drew Robbins (Developer Evangelist for the Heartland District) does for developers.

I’m really looking forward to working with many of you through my work at Microsoft.

I went shopping for a new laptop for my brother this past weekend. It was nuts - Circuit City didn’t have the display model for the one that we wanted to buy and they would not open the box to let us look at the one that we were interested in. My brother didn’t care, but I was a touch perturbed by it all. It’s the little things that really make a difference to a real road warrior and they wouldn’t let us check those things. It turns out that I was right to want to check – it was set up as a left handed laptop. What I mean by that is that the power was on the right hand side where it’s in the way of the mouse and the USB ports and the like were on the left hand side where you have to run cables from the mouse all the way around the rest of the box to plug it in. This would be great if me or my brother were actually left handed but we are not.

I don’t know of other people think the same way that I do about that, but it drives me nuts when I see that type of setup. I think that laptop manufactures should put left handed or right handed on the box so we know when they put all of the ports on the sides of the box. The laptop that I’m using right now (Fujitsu T4020 Tablet) has a USB on the left and one on the back. The one on the back is obviously for the mouse. The power is also on the back. This means that it can be ambidextrous. I guess that’s one of the differences between a $550.00 laptop (what my brother bought) and a $2000 tablet (what I bought).

I wonder if the manufacturers consciously think about these issues…

I’m still alive – I’m just swamped! I’m working full time onsite with a huge deadline on Friday and trying to organize a conference (http://dayofdotnet.org) this week. I could drop either of those tasks and still have a busy week. I don’t know where I’d be without the help of John Hopkins and Jason Follas on the conference and with John’s help at the client.

I did squeak out to hear a fantastic talk from Dustin Campbell at Ann Arbor .NET Developers Group on the top 10 developer tools that everyone that uses Visual Studio needs. I even picked up a few last night. ILMerge was new to me. I learned a lot about CodeRush last night as well. I’m an avid fan, but I still learned a ton…

More next week – after things calm down.