I've had the privilege to share the TechEd stage with Steve Swartz this year at Barcelona. Our 6 talks on the Connected Systems story and the themes that will be motivating our work for the next 3-4 years were great fun to do and were very well received. Over the next several weeks, I'll be writing about the middle 4 talks (Logic, Data, Presentation, Identity and Access) here. I'll also post excerpts of a larger application scenario that I've shown in one of these talks.
The reason for my silence on the blog over the past several months was a mix of self-restraint and being quite busy between work and getting settled over here in the US. The more interesting aspect of that is certainly the "self-restraint" story, since I am probably not really known for that. J
One of the great things that I am finding about working here at Microsoft is that it's absolutely possible to cause stuff being fixed that one considers broken. So instead of loudly complaining about them in a public forum, I much rather go and talk to the respective people. Complaining loudly will just annoy them and reduce the chances of stuff getting fixed. In addition to that, I am not writing any less or about vastly different topics than I have been, but now most of that is directed towards the inside and contributed to product development – which is by nature a bit more clandestine in the early planning stages of a product.
The great news of last week was that we shipped! I'll be getting my first Microsoft "Ship It!" tag for that and we'll have a huge party this Friday night which will surely be a blast.
I've also nominated a batch of 10 people for the MVP title in the "Windows Server System – Connected Systems Developer" competency just before I left for TechEd. We'll know by mid December who of these individuals will make it through the approval process and they'll be MVPs come January. The next nomination cycle is already on and people nominated in that cycle might become MVPs in April 2007. As the timing will likely work out, the people who are MVPs by that quarter will get some very interesting insights into things that we'll only be ready talk about publicly towards the end of 2007.
How can I become an MVP, you ask? There are several ways to get up on our radar (speaking at conferences included), but one sure way is to be very active and helpful in our MSDN Forums: WCF, Workflow, ASMX, Remoting, CardSpace.
My favorite event of the year is coming up. Time to dust off the blog and check whether it’s all still working. TechEd Europe! Yay. We’ve got news on Tuesday.
I just disabled Trackback and Pingback. We need security and a trust chain for these protocols. This is getting ridiculous.
The request below has been handed to me by the BizTalk team here at Microsoft. If you have programmed in WCF, happen to be at or around the Microsoft Redmond campus at that time and want to help out, send an email until this Friday to uccoord at microsoft.com with the subject line "BizTalk Usability Study" to sign up:
Microsoft is conducting research on BizTalk Server, and are seeking Developers who have a working knowledge of this product and WCF. If you are a current BizTalk Developer, with WCF experience, the team would like to invite you to participate in this research.
Studies are currently being scheduled for Monday Oct 30 through Friday Nov 3, 2006 in Redmond, WA. Each study will be scheduled at your convenience and will run approximately 2 hours. This is a unique opportunity to provide feedback on the adapter creation process in BizTalk.
Your input and participation is extremely valuable that helps ensure that your needs are met when interacting with BizTalk and WCF. If scheduled for a usability study, you will receive a retail software product selection for your time and feedback. Some of the items include Office Pro and VisualStudio.NET
I've posted the current WCF Training Providers list on wcf.netfx3.com this weekend. All of these folks are running custom-built training classes for WCF and until we here at MS come out with the "official" Microsoft Official Curriculum" for WCF and the other .NET Framework 3.0 technologies (which will take several months from when Vista ships), these offerings are indeed our preferred option for you to get WCF training.
One event that I'll personally highlight and happily and shamelessly advertise is a cooperation by my ex-firm newtelligence and my friends at IDesign, because it's coming up very soon. One of the coolest aspect of that class is that it is scheduled to take place in Europe's #1 vacation spot Mallorca, which means that cheap flights should be available from anywhere and the weather is nice, too. Registration is open and my understanding is that it closes this week! I wish I could go.
If you are looking for a brilliant speaker for a conference, consider Chad Hower. As you might know, I make very few endorsements of that sort. Chad has been touring the Middle-East and Africa region for Microsoft in the past several years and spoke at countless conferences. And there might be is no better source for "travel war stories" than him; the stuff he's been through on his trips makes my (known to be extensive) travel history pale in comparison.
Chad is leaving the company in a few days from now and I wouldn't know anybody here who wouldn't be sad to see him go. The good news is that he'll be an independent speaker and if you run a conference or a user group anywhere in EMEA, you should really consider have him come over and talk.
Moving here kept and still keeps me busier than I thought it would. And the sea container with our personal stuff (furniture etc) hasn't even arrived, yet.
While my job role here at Microsoft didn't formally change between when I was working from home in Germany and now, the additional bandwidth that I have has pretty much changed every single detail of it. In addition, I've been dragged into WCF SDK document reviews, architecture discussions for our next version and a whole lot of others things from which I was pretty much excluded over in Germany due to the time difference and because I simply didn't know the team's "who is who" (getting to know your own team is quite difficult when you are all the way across the Atlantic).
Starting to revive the blog is on the agenda for this week.
Indigo The Windows Communication Foundation's RC1 bits are now live. RC means "Release Candidate" and our team is really, really serious about this release being as close to what we intend to ship as we can ever get. Our database view with unresolved code-defects is essentially empty (there is a not more of a handful of small fixes for very esoteric scenarios that we're still doing for RTM). The time of breaking changes is absolutely and finally over for "WCF Version 1".
The team is very excited about this. There's lots of joy in the hallways. We're getting close to being done. Remember when you saw the first WS-* specs popping up out there some 6 years ago? That's when this thing was started. You can just imagine how pumped the testers, developers and program managers are around here. And even though I am new to the family, I get to celebrate a little too. Greatness.
Get the RC1 for the .NET Framework 3.0 with the WCF bits from here:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=19E21845-F5E3-4387-95FF-66788825C1AF&displaylang=en
There's one little issue with the Visual Studio Tools aligned with that version, so it will take another day or so until those get uploaded.
As always, if you find problems, tell us: http://connect.microsoft.com/wcf
We moved. For the most part. Sabine and I now live in a temporary housing location that Microsoft set us up in while we wait for practically everything we own except for the 5 suitcases that we brought along with us a week ago. One half of the rest are about 9 boxes that were sent as air-freight and sit at Seattle-Tacoma Airport and we’re expecting to clear customs and be shipped to our temporary apartment any day now. The other half is a 40-feet long sea container with our furniture and most everything else that we own that’s somewhere in the belly of a container freighter between Bremerhaven and California at this time. I write “in the belly” because I hope it’s not in one of the upper 3-4 layers above deck – which are actually supposed to go overboard when the ship gets into heavy seas …
So between the last few posts here just after our wedding and today, there was hardly any time to get much serious work done. Not that moving isn’t any work, but it’s not what I consider being productive in the job. Right after we came back from our honeymoon in beautiful Vietnam (it’s a great place with gorgeous landscapes, very friendly people and lethally dangerous street traffic) we started to wrap and pack our things. While the moving company wouldn’t let us pack anything in our apartment and even repacked the boxes from the last move that ended up in the basement, dealing with the immaterial things to wrap up proved to be a lot more time consuming than we both anticipated. Cancelling insurances and contracts like mobile phones and cable TV, negotiating with the service providers to avoid early cancellation fees, selling both of our cars, etctetc. And of course there was some sort of “farewell” party/dinner/drinks event with friends and family almost every evening in the last two weeks – with all the emotional stress that comes with that, especially for Sabine’s family. My family took it a little easier since they are used to me circling the globe and I’ve already done the move from Germany to America once before for a while.
However, by now all of that stress has mostly dissolved thanks to the excellent communication options at hand these days. We’ve got Webcams along with Messenger and Skype, friends and family are looking up the best phone rates for Germany-to-US calls from the website billiger-telefonieren.de (depending on time of day, there are providers offering calls for less than 1 (one) Euro Cent per minute) and Sabine sends lots of pictures around so everyone knows where we landed.
Microsoft. Ah, yes, Microsoft. The relocation benefits that the company offers for international hires are quite astonishing. Except for doing your personal paperwork to get rid of your contracts, selling your cars (forget about bringing foreign cars to the US unless they are collector’s items and more than 30 years old) and selling or renting out your house, everything else is taken care of. We got a temporary furnished apartment and a rental car and a lump sum expense payment so that we can, for instance, replace all those small appliances like coffee maker, toaster, and mixer that aren’t compatible between Europe and here. It goes so far that if you lose money on the sale of your house or car by having to sell it quickly and under fair market value (which is common when you sell a car to a dealer), you will get compensated for the difference (up to a certain cap). For the first couple of months we even have someone personally assigned to us who helps with setting up banking, getting our driver’s licenses, finding a new place to live, getting shopping advice, etcetc. It’s great.
While all of that was and is going on, our team is putting the finishing touches on our first release of the Windows Communication Foundation in the .NET Framework 3.0. And we’re doing very good. Between all the moving craziness I’ve been contributing a tiny little bit to the product by writing two of the SDK samples to help landing the SDK smoothly on the deadline for the RTM SDK code content. Besides that, there was no time for blogging and therefore I didn’t. Yes, I might have been able to, but I’m not Scoble  Sorry for the long blog-silence. I’ll better myself. Have good start into your work week.
Big game. Italy won. That's football. Life goes on
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