Change is good

As some of you may already know, I have decided to leave the patterns & practices team. I have been working with the team as a consultant and as an employee for 2 1/2 years. I have enjoyed my tenure with the group. I was able to work with great people like David Trowbridge, Ward Cunningham, and my development team which includes Jonathan Wanagel, Naveen Yajaman, Scott Densmore, Peter Provost, and most recently Brad Wilson. I think and I am sure many of you would agree this is great group of people and I consider myself privileged to have worked directly with them. You may be asking yourself why I would leave. In short, am I running from a situation or running to a better situation. In this case I am embracing a new and I think a unique opportunity at Microsoft. For the past six months Sandy Khaund and I (among others) have been working on a way for Microsoft employees and customers to do collaborative software development. As Sandy says in one of his posts, be careful for what you wish for, you might get it. In fact, I will be joining Sandy’s team to lead the next generation of the GotDotNet workspaces. I have already hit the ground running and you should be seeing more posts going forward as we articulate a vision for the next version of workspaces. I realize there is a lot of competition out there (I know I used Sourceforge to build NUnit V2) and some of you have not been satisfied by the current version of the workspaces. However, we are addressing some short term needs (thanks Betsy) and I am sure you will be seeing some interesting things as we move forward. In addition to Sandy I am very much looking forward to working with Betsy Aoki and Korby Parnell.

If you have an idea/suggestion/comment/complaint about workspaces please let me know. Customer feedback will play a key role in the enhancements that we we planning for the site. Consider this your first chance to participate in the shaping of what we hope becomes the best collaborative software development site. For those that want to do more! We are currently hiring a Software Development Engineering Lead and a Software Test Engineering Lead. If you are interested drop me a line and we will talk.