I took a brief hiatus from blogging for awhile, largely to settle into my new digs in Seattle and also to start to familiarize myself with my new role in Microsoft's Developer Division. But now I'm back, and I wanted to give you a brief update on some of the things my team and I are working on, as well as some observations I've had being a "newbie" over here in Redmond.
(1) My second week at MSFT, I attended and spoke at Enterprise 2.0 in Boston. Now, I've spoken at a lot of conferences, but this time was different... I was definitely under a microscope - - not from MSFT, but from the community side. Literally every word that I spoke on my mashup panel was picked up - but, that said, I stand behind my belief that I really speak from my own experience and I'm not going to alter what I say to please the company I work for. And evidently, that's why I get put on panels. :) (thanks sandy!)
(2) I was very quickly thrown into my role running the Web Platform & Standards team over here. After digging in, I realized that we're currently doing a great job talking about the products we have that work with web (which are pretty solid, btw), but when it comes to pulling them together as a solution set to solve specific problems, we've got some work to do. I've been spending almost 100% of my time heads-down working with our internal groups (Open Source teams, SQL, IIS, etc) to really create full solutions to the real problems we're seeing out there when it comes to web development - whether it be as simple as building out a website or figuring out how to build simple apps to get the job done (write once, run everywhere) or figuring out the best way to take these applications and scale them. We've got a great group of folks over here that are looking at the best applications to help solve these problems, and we're looking to announce some changes soon. More to come on this. (Also check out Bill Staples' blog; he's been hacking away with us and driving a ton of the work we're doing from the engineering side).
(3) One of the things I've been looking at is what types of languages people are building apps in, and how we can really reach out to not just our ASP.NET community, but reach further into other communities to support them building apps in PHP, IronRuby, IronPython, and others (yep, I got knocked around a bit for putting Java on a slide, but hey, my job is to think big and outside the box). We have a thriving ASP.NET community and lots of amazing developers and apps (as well as a kick-ass release coming soon) but I also think it's important to support devs that are building in other languages as well. We've made some major inroads here - and again, I'll have much more to say about this soon.
(4) I'm still thinking about the development ecosystem and how we can work to improve on this. I've been discussing this frequently with Bill Staples who heads up IIS (and whose team successfully uses the agile development model - very cool) and I hope to be able to spend some more time on this soon - with his help. :)
This is a huge undertaking, and I understand that MSFT can't change overnight, but I do have to tell you that there are a ton of smart folks over here that really "get it" and understand the changes that have to take place. We're doing a lot of great stuff, but there's always more to do and we're always up for feedback, so let me know - [email protected] or comment below.
I can't wait to fill you in on more... but for now, I think this is a start. I don't know about you, but I'm ready for some change.... /LC