After 22 years, 3 months, 2 weeks, 3 days, I've decided to leave Microsoft.

Yes,  you've heard correct. It's time!

My time with Microsoft started way back on 1991, in Canberra, as a Systems Engineer. I was the first technical guy in a small team of 4 people. I got to Canberra after I had followed a girl (who I had met in Melbourne) all the way to Canberra., That girl became my wife, and over the journey we've spent time in Seattle, Sydney, Seattle again and ultimately Melbourne, which is where I started. Funny that.

The career summary looks a bit like this

Along the way we had 4 children who have grown up immersed in all things Microsoft - they all have their Nokia Lumias, and Windows 8 tablets, and love their XBOX, I don’t think this will change in a hurry.

And then, there's my other family - the awesome evangelists I hired, the communitymembers who helped spread the word of the Microsoft platform - from .net, hailstorm, silverlight, to windows phone, windows, windows azure, and everything else in between.

Thank you all for making my Microsoft time very enjoyable and not feel like just a job.

This week also sees TechEd on the Gold Coast - and while I am there, we recorded the 100th episode of FranklySpeaking with my good friends Andrew Coates and Michael Kordahi, where I speak with the guys about my time at Microsoft. I had fun recording the session

I now have a chance to look around, smell the roses and find that next great job that isnt really a job which I can commit my heart and soul into, just like the last one.

I wont be blogging here anymore - but you can find me at http://frankarr.com,

Seems like a good idea, right?

I grabbed the Kinect for Windows SDK, and went looking on codeplex for kinect related samples, where I found the Kinect PowerPoint Control. It was nice, but It didn’t do exactly what I wanted.

By coincidence, Dr Neil sent me an email about nsquared slyda, which just lets me change between slides using hand gestures.

Perfecto!!

We had a practice session and kiddo can move forward and back, with a wave of the hands.

Next stop, the classroom!!!

BTW – I see that boffins at nsquared solutions are working on more Kinect apps. I got a ping last night from Dr Neil about nsquared spydar, which is like the Coding4Fun Kinect Turret minus the violence.  I got it set up – now let’s see who comes and uses my PC when I’m away….

How can I not contribute to this worthy cause……

The year  was 1981, and my high school, CBC StKilda,  got a fancy new Cromenco computer system. I was asked to man the computer lab by my math teacher, Mrs Fagin, and to pass the time, I wrote programs in Structured Basic.

I remember putting in programs that would  to print out ASCII art – playboy bunny logo and Alfred E. Newman stick in my memory.  After spending time playing in that lab, I decided to following a computing path, even though I had been planning to go on and do medicine. 

I signed up for the EDP (or Electronic Data Processing) course at CIT in 1982. In my first year we used punch cards to input out programs. I still have some those punch cards someone in the garage – I’ve carried them for almost 30 years!  In my second year, the class had access to time sharing terminals connected to a PR1ME computer and we worked on PR1ME Information (which was similar to PICK), as well as COBOL and FORTRAN, and in my third year, we had a dedicated Data General system,  we programmed in COBOL and PL/1 and we had access to a new fangled a IBM PC and a software package called KnowledgeMan for our group project.

After graduating, I entered the workforce as a humble programmer and my first job was converting FORTRAN applications for an engineering company on St Kilda Rd, who were migrating systems. That was the start of many projects during my time

So there you have it….

1991 was a big year for me.

I got married.

I bought a house.

My first child was born

AND

I joined Microsoft on May 20, 1991

Today marks my 20th year anniversary at Microsoft.

As I have done for the past few years (19, 18, 17, 16. 15, 14, 13), time to reflect a bit on my time at Microsoft. Yes, I still *love* the job.

The resume stays the same, but I’m now back in Australia, based in Melbourne.

This year, I find myself in a different situation -- I don’t have an office, so no 20lbs of M&Ms sitting in a bowl outside my door to share with my work colleagues.

It’s kinda weird that I have no one to share the moment with. It’s just another day.

But, I did get a rather large and heavy parcel sent to me.

which had another box inside

and inside that box was another box addressed to me

it was like a Babushka doll!!

So – what’s in it?

Well – it’s my 20 year “crystal” from Microsoft. (yeah – crappy photo, I know. I’ll take another one in the morning)

So – 20 years down, and the future looks promising – skype is joining the family, kinect is going gang busters with it’s own SDK , windows phone is getting Angry Birds soon.

Seems like there’s a lots to still do, and I’m pretty excited to continue doing it.

Plus, now that I’m back in Australia – I can get along to some local events, such as DDD Melbourne, PREMIX & REMIX

Bring on the next 20! Maybe I’ll get some M&Ms just for me and the kids!…

This week , I grabbed the v2 of the Social Viewer Template for Windows Phone 7 from codeplex and put together another windows phone 7 app, which I called Saints Footy.

It has twitter feeds, feeds from news sites and fan sites, and the facebook feed from saints.com.au – the best way to experience Saints Footy on Windows Phone!!

Now, if only the Saints would win a few more games….

Big shout out to Nick Randolph and Dave Glover for a wonderful job with the Social Viewer Template. 

I just never got around to it, until I saw a tweet from Nick Hodge which inspired me to get started

Nick pointed me to the Windows Phone 7 Social Viewer Application Template that Nick Randolph and Dave Glover had put together.

The Social Viewer template is a Visual Studio template that allows you to jump start the development of a Windows Phone 7 application. It provides the foundations of an application that can aggregate multiple RSS/Atom feeds, Facebook and Twitter.

I downloaded the zip file, looked over the documentation the guys had put together, and then I got started.

First, I got the tools installed onto my Samsung Series 9 laptop.

• Installed Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone
• Install January 2011 Windows Phone Tools Update

Next, I fired up Visual Studio, opened up the Social Viewer App Template and got coding.

Then I got my kids involved to design the app icon.

Emma suggested I put “Tech Frank” onto a radar image – so off I went.

I futzed with Paint.Net for a while trying to get the image just right.  Dave was right – the icon is the thing that took the longest time!

Bill gave me a few pointers and voila - application icon created!

So what does the app do?

Well, you’re going to have to install it and find out for yourself

Enjoy!! Who knows, you may find FrankArr in your neck of the woods!

It should be a good one this year – the sessions look great and the keynotes are not to be missed.

I said it before, and I’ll say it again – the team missed an opportunity to play with the name with some good old fashioned roman numeral hijinks.

So, I am the “mayor” of a bunch of places. At one point, I got to 30 venues.

Anyways, since I’m leaving town, the mayorship of the spots will be up for grabs.

• Casa Arrigo

• Starbucks - Rosehill

• Microsoft Building 24

• 24/2362

• Microsoft Main Campus

• Hoffman's Fine Pastries

• Morsel's

• Heathman Hotel

• Top Of South Parking Garage @Bell Square

• Kinect XBOX 360 @ Macy's

• Newport Hills Park

• Gap Kids

• Enterprise Rent A Car

• Juicy Couture

• Prime Meridian

• Fuego

• Cafe Vita - microsoft commons

• Chevron - Clyde Hill

• Brown Bear Car Wash

I would love to see how long it takes for all these go – a week? a month? a year?

Happy Foursquaring.

Wait, What?

Yup – I’m heading back down under. Now, I say *I* because the rest of my family already went back nearly 2 months ago.

Wait, What?

Here they are at Sea-Tax airport when they were heading out on their journey back to Australia.

So I stayed behind to get the house packed – it was karma really, since I left Moira alone to pack when we moved from Sydney to Seattle. Hopefully we’re even now

We had a lot of stuff to pack. The final tally was 256 boxes and 251 wrapped items for a grand total of 507 items, which took up a 40’ & 20’ container and which weighed something like 20,000 lbs. Yes - That’s a lot of stuff!

Now the boxes are loaded, the containers are full, the house is empty and clean and I’m waiting for the confirmation that the sale is complete.

Soon my second Seattle adventure comes to an end, just as the local weather starts to improve and Spring begins.

What’s next?

Well – I’m heading back to Melbourne this time around. It’s my hometown. I left Melbourne in 1990 with my then girlfriend, Moira Brice. Now, I’m heading back to join Moira and my 4 kids. They are all loving it, so I cant wait to join them.

I’m also changing jobs, but I’ll save the details about that in another post.

So true.

I picked up a Windows Phone 7 when it launched back in November. I’m a loyal (some say foolish) T-Mobile customer, so I went with the T-Mobile HTC HD7

I must admit I have been pretty happy with the phone (anyone surprised to hear that) apart from one thing.

It was reset by one of my kids when they tried to unlock the phone. He put in the wrong pin a few times, which got an policy enforced to do a remote wipe. I must admit, I did loose my cool for a while. I almost ruined christmas for my family a second time, but cooler heads prevailed.

The experience taught me a few things, which brings me back to apps. The one most relevant to this is that I need a way to remember what apps I have installed on the phone. Since I had installed most of my apps “Over The Air”, there is no way to “automagically” restore the installed apps. If I had installed them via the desktop client (aka Zune Client) they would have be reinstalled. Now, the good thing when I do ‘re-install’ the apps, is that the the marketplace tells me that I have already purchased them so I don’t have to buy them again.Phew!

So, how do I remember what apps I have installed? It seems there is no easy way. However, I found a great little site, developed by an italian MVP, called WP7Applist. It a pretty cool site that is full of reviews, updates, news of new apps etc, but the one thing i  L-O-V-E about it is the ability to tag an app you have installed and it creates the My WP7A library.

I took a look at the page, did some scrapping and voila – the apps I have installed on my phone!

Yeah, it’s a bunch of apps isn’t it and I haven’t gotten to games yet!!! I’ll save that for another post.