It's been a looooong time, but I finally got around to geting DevHawk back online. It's hard to believe that it's been over a year since my last post. Lots has happened in that time!

First off, I've changed jobs (again). Last year, I made the switch from program manager to dev. Unfortunately, the project I was working on was cancelled. After several months in limbo, I was reorganized into the .NET Core framework team back over in DevDiv. I've got lots of friends in DevDiv and love the open source work they are doing. But I really missed being in Windows. Earlier this year, I joined the team that builds the platform plumbing for SmartGlass. Not much to talk about publicly right now, but that will change sometime soon.

In addition to my day job in SmartGlass, I'm also pitching in to help the Microsoft Services Disaster Response team. I knew Microsoft has a long history of corporate giving. However, I was unaware of the work we do helping communities affected by natural disasters until recently. My good friend Lewis Curtis took over as Director of Microsoft Services Disaster Response last year. I'm currently helping out on some of the missions for Nepal in response to the devestating earthquake that hit there earlier this year.

Finally, I decided that I was tired of running Other Peoples Code^tm on my website. So I built out a new blog engine called Hawk. It's written in C# (plus about 30 lines of JavaScript), uses ASP.NET 5 and runs on Azure. It's specifically designed for my needs - for example, it automatically redirects old DasBlog style links like http://devhawk.net/2005/10/05/code+is+model.aspx. But I'm happy to let other people use it and would welcome contributions. When I get a chance, I'll push the code up to GitHub.

So it would make a crappy song, but the title of this post is still true. This is my first post on the new-and-improved DevHawk running on WordPress.

I decided a while back that it was time to modernize my blog engine – DasBlog is getting a little long of tooth and there hasn’t been a new release in over two years. I spent some time looking at different options, but settled on WordPress for much the same reasons Windows Live did: “host of impressive capabilities”, scalable and widely used. Also, it’s very extensible, has about a billion available themes and has a very active development community. I was able to find plugins to replicate DasBlog’s archive page as well as archive widget that replicated custom functionality that I added to DasBlog via custom macros.

Of course, moving eight years worth of posts to a new engine took quite a bit of effort and planning. I wanted to make sure that I maintained all my posts and comments as well as take advantage of some of the new features available to me from WordPress. For example, I took the opportunity to flatten my list of categories and move most of them to be tags. I also went thru and converted all of my old code snippets to use SyntaxHighlighter instead of CodeHTMLer or Pygments for WL Writer. Of course, I automated almost all of the conversion process. For anyone interested in following my footsteps, I published my PowerShell scripts for converting DasBlog to the WordPress WXR import/export format up on BitBucket.

Not only did I want to save all my data, I also wanted to make sure I saved my search engine mojo (if I have any left after blogging a paltry six times in the past sixteen months). So I hacked up a WordPress plugin to redirect my old DasBlog links to the new WordPress URLs. That’s up on BitBucket as well for anyone who wants it. It’s got some DevHawk specific bits in there (like the category cleanup) but if you tore those parts out it would be usable for any DasBlog-to-WordPress conversion. If there’s interest, maybe I’ll write up how the conversion scripts and redirect plugin work.

The plan is that now that I’m finally done moving my blog over the new back end, I will actually start writing on a more regular basis again. We’ll see how that works out.

I just joined The Lounge advertising network so I wanted to pass along an opportunity to win a bunch of great technical books.

The Lounge is asking the readers of the blogs in their network to fill out a survey in order for them to improve how they target their advertising. It’s pretty much what you would expect from an advertising network focused on the .NET development platform: what language(s) do you use, what framework(s), what testing tool(s), etc, etc, etc. Takes like three minutes to fill out at most.

We all know that filling out surveys isn’t what most people consider “exciting” or “fun”. In order to incent you, dear Reader, to take a few minutes of your valuable time to fill out the survey, The Lounge is giving away all forty one of Manning’s “In Action” books, including IronPython In Action. Even if you don’t win, you still get 40% discount off any purchase from Manning.

So it’s up to you, a scant few minutes of your time in exchange for a chance to win enough technical books to keep you busy for months.

For those of you who read this blog primarily via my RSS feed, I made a change to my homepage over the weekend. Goodbye adSense, hello The Lounge. The Lounge is an ad network run by James Avery’s company InfoZerk. I’ve known James for a while – he included my now-obsolete SccSwitch tool in his book Visual Studio Hacks.

From a financial perspective, I’m not really sure how much of a difference this will make. I guess I’ll see when I get my first check. Given how little I was making with adSense, I’ve got nowhere to go but up. Regardless, I feel much better working with a smaller ad network run by someone I respect and that is focused on the .NET platform.

Thanks for having me in the Lounge ad network, James.

I’m working on a new series of posts on parser monads, but I accidentally pushed out part thre (I hit “Publish” instead of “New” in WL Writer). I can’t stop you from reading it, as it’s already in Google and FeedBurner’s cache. However, if you want any context at all, do yourself a favor and wait until I publish parts one and two first!