Has it been a slow week for everyone, or just me my first week back from vacation?

• I got email last night from Pat Helland – he’s re-taking the red pill. He starts in the developer division on Monday. He asked for my help getting is website up to date, so look for that in the near future. In the meantime, revisit some of Pat’s hits: Metropolis, Data on the Inside vs. Data on the Outside, The Nerd, the Suit, and the Fortune Teller and his greatest hit Mr. CIO Guy.
• The new 4.0 version of the Visual Studio 2005 SDK is out. Details on James’ vs.Eco blog.
• Next week is the Game Developers Conference. About a month ago, Dave Weller wrote that he had “been busy” and the XNA team blog has also been fairly silent. I have no inside information on this, but given that last years GDC was the first time we showed managed code running on an Xbox 360, the time is nigh for XNA announcements.

• According to Chris “Long Tail” Anderson (as opposed to Chris “Avalon Architect” Anderson), “Combined with the new low-cost distribution channels, from DVD to digital downloads, all you now need to be a filmmaker is talent.” Really? Based on the dreck Hollywood churns out, I thought talent was optional! 😄 Seriously, check out his post and the sites he points to (Four Eyed Monsters and DV Rebel’s Guide review on Cool Tools).
• Speaking of Chris “Avalon” Anderson, he’s got a couple of WPF/E tests up on his blog. I wanted to see how it worked under the hood, so I checked out the HTML source for this page. It includes around 115kb of XAML! We’ve seen ViewState and JavaScript page bloat, is XAML bloat next?
• Larry O’Brien and Alan Zeichick are talking about a Threading Maturity Model. Good ideas there, but frankly I think we need a language that recognizes concurrency as a first-order abstraction if we’re going to make much progress up the maturity model.
• Dare recommendsprogramming.reddit.com. Definitely worthy of a closer look.
• The BTS training I’m in yesterday and today is being held on Microsoft’s Red West campus, home of MSN & Windows Live. It’s very nice looking and is a good size – five buildings – without being as huge as main campus. It even has a “ski-lodge” cafeteria, though given the slim pickings in my building’s cafe anything would be an improvement.
• One thing I don’t miss about working on campus is the commute. Getting to my office takes 20-30 minutes, depending on the traffic lights. Getting to campus, even though it’s physically closer, takes 45-60 minutes, most of it spent sitting still. Every time I wish we’d move to campus, I remember the traffic and decide I like where I am just fine.
• Two big learnings from BTS training yesterday:
  • Conceptually, BTS hasn’t changed much since the 2000/2002 releases that I was more familiar with. In practice, it has heavily embraced .NET which is a good thing. I didn’t realize how much of a difference having tools like the pipeline and map editor inside VS would make, but it does. (I realize the orchestration editor is inside VS as well, but we get to that module of the class today).
  • The MessageBox is a bigger deal than I remember or realized. Matt called it the “heart of BizTalk”. I know BTS has had a SQL based message store since day one, but I don’t remember it being called out explicitly.
• I’ve said before that MessageBox is roughly analogous to SSB queues, though BTS wonks (like my teammates) typically jump down my throat when I do. MessageBox has a pub/sub design philosophy which SSB does not. However, I’m guessing pub/sub is used much more in messaging scenarios rather than orchestration scenarios. My efforts around SSB & WF are much more focused on orchestration scenarios, so I’m guessing SSB’s lack of pub/sub infrastructure is not a big deal.

I gave up drinkin’, I gave up smokin’
I gave up thinkin’ all the time, stone cold revoken
No reason to my rhyme, I wasn’t jokin’
If there’s a phony bone in me, I want it broken
“Rub It In” by All Day Sucker

I’m trying to write more in 2007. Here’s a roundup of stuff rattling around my brain:

• Fight On! So much for Michigan and their bleating about being left out of the championship game. Also, massive congrats to Boise State.
• Santa did bring me free time this holiday, but I spent it playing games rather than writing them. I’m digging Gears (big surprise) and Dead Rising, and I’ve starting playing Viva Pinata with Patrick. Plus, I finished GRAW which I had on loan from a friend just in time to start playing Vegas. Note I said “free time” which is to say time when I wasn’t hanging out with my family. Typically during naps or after everyone was in bed, though I did skip at least one birthday party to play instead.
• We had a “surprise” snow storm two days after Christmas. Not enough to be dangerous driving, but enough to make a snowman with my kids. It’s still there, though now that it’s 55 degrees, I’m guessing it will be totally melted by the time I get home from work. It’s been melting a little bit each day, so it’s been like watching the climax of Raiders of the Lost Ark in slow motion.
• My wife and I finished watching season 5 of Alias last night. Fun, though it had really jumped the shark by Season 5. We watched the entire series on DVD, which really makes me wonder about the future of broadcast TV. We watched season 1 of Lost on DVD but we’ve been watching on TV ever since. I’m hooked on Lost, so there’s no way I could go back to DVDs at this point, but I’m thinking that DVD is a better way to go for most TV. I wonder how this will change TV storytelling.
• I wish I could see how a show like Lost or Alias evolves over time. How much of the Rimbaldi story arc was mapped out before the show started? How did the production team deal with forced changes like Jennifer Garner’s pregnancy or the apparently surprise series cancellation?
• I had 12 days off for the holidays, so it’s very tough to be back at work. As I suggested above, I did very little coding while I was off, so getting back in the saddle won’t be easy. It’s especially hard on my little boy that I’m back to work. He was acting up yesterday which is fairly unusual. I finally asked him if he was sad about me going back to work and he broke down crying. I’m very lucky to be a part of such a tight knit family.
• I’ve been in my “new” job for six months, but it seems like longer. I mean that in a good way. It feels like I fit better in this job, on a much smaller team, actually building stuff instead of just “evangelizing” it. Nothing against evangelism, I just think I burned out on that job.

So starts a new feature on DevHawk. As you might guess from the “1″ in the title, I’m hoping to make this a regular feature. As I ease back into work, expect more tech related nuggets along with the more random stuff. I should admit, however, that I actually don’t drink coffee. 😄

Even though I moved offices just a month ago, we moved again today. New office won’t be ready until Monday, so I “worked from home”. Of course, with two kids too young for school, getting much actual work done is essentially impossible. I did manage to get my blog upgraded to dasBlog 1.9 during the kids’ naps.

My new office building is “Issaquah Black” which is a much cooler name than “18″ or “Sammamish C”. The building used to be a Boeing building. In fact, my old next door neighbor used to work in this building, back when he and I lived a scant 2.5 mile / 6 minute commute from here. Boeing moved him to Everett and apparently decided to get rid of the building. A year ago, I moved to a new house on the outskirts of Redmond, so my commute is 12.5 miles / 20 minutes. Significantly longer than if I had never moved, but I love my house and can easily deal with a 20 minute commute. Even though main campus is closer (only 8 miles), with all the rush hour traffic it takes closer to 45 to get there!

Tanya, my cohort on the Architecture Strategy Marketing team, has finally – after much promising and subsequent delays – starter her blog. So far, just she’s just written a hello world post where she explains why she named her blog “Wabi-Sabi”.

Of course, long time readers are probably wondering: “Did he just say ‘Marketing team’?”

Yes. Yes I did.

About two weeks ago, I was re-orged to be reporting to Norman. While you might expect me to be displeased about this, I’m really ok with it. First off, I was acting as the marketing director for about six months, so the fact that we now have three people doing marketing instead of just me is a huge bonus. Secondly, while I was acting as the marketing director (badly I might add) I was in total firefighting mode – no opportunity to do advance planning whatsoever. Now, I have the opportunity to focus on doing a great job on a few things well (like the TechEd Architecture track) rather than doing just enough to keep a ton of things from completely falling apart. It’s taken a while to shift gears, but now I spend more time doing and less time running around like a chicken with my head cut off.

Finally, my move to the marketing team is inherently temporary. Yeah, it’s fun while it lasts and I’m learning a ton, but don’t think this is a long term career change. Before it even happened, Adam (head of Architecture Strategy) explained that he expects me to be over on the architecture side of the house “soon”. Norman and I have already started planning that transition.

So get your “marketing slime” digs in while you can! (Apparently, we marketing slime prefer the term “marketing flacks”.)