As with most people, my decision to leave is bittersweet. I love telling people how I had no intention of staying at Microsoft for longer than three years, but the combination of compelling work and a great people led me to double my expected tenure. This was my first job after business school and Microsoft saved me from a life in management consulting, spending my time composing diagrams, matrices, and graphs but never really building anything. I worked on some great teams on exciting initiatives and it was rarely boring. However, my desire has always been to help grow and lead a startup company and this move brings my career back towards that goal.

With a software company like Microsoft, it’s intrinsic value doesn’t lie in manufacturing plants or raw materials, but rather in talented employees who dedicate their lives to build great software with a quest to change the world.  Similarly, my experience was less about the tangibles and more about the people that I had the great fortune to interact with during these six years.  To identify everyone who impacted me would lead me to a Oscar-style speech where I run long and still miss important people (I envision Hillary Swank forgetting her husband in 2000).  I’ll just say thanks to everyone that stuck me in front of the fire hose, pushed me to prove myself, challenged me intellectually, supported me on my quests (as far-fetched as some of them were), and taught me the “Microsoft Way”.  I leave here wiser and more battle-tested than when I came in.  I only hope I provided half as much in return—and that goes for managers, peers, and the teams I managed. 

I always wondered what my legacy would be when I left Microsoft.  After all, I was one of 70-80,000 employees here and it's easy to get lost in the crowd.  That said, looking back at the list of accomplishments brings a smile to my face.  I take pride in what came out of the patterns & practices team and the tremendous adulation from customers that came with it.  I am amazed at the runaway success of the patterns & practices Summits that Keith Pleas and I conceived of three years ago.  I love showing the scars of how Betsy Aoki and I (more her than me) saved GotDotNet.  I brag about the lengths that Jim Newkirk and I went through to get CodePlex through the system and out the door.    And I am heartened by the ambition my team tried to show with Tagspace and Claimspace, two projects that I believe were revolutionary in many ways but never found a happy home.  If there's one thing that seems consistent, it's that I worked on projects that were unconventional, somewhat counter-culture, and a little risky.  I suppose my need for ambition and risk lends itself to a startup atmosphere, which helped make my choice that much easier.  Now, we'll find out if I can pass the test without the great support system that I've grown to rely upon in the last six years.  If I can find the right partners in crime like the ones above, I trust I'll be just fine.

I don't know where my next blog will be.  I should still have access for one final post for subscribers to redirect.  I haven't provided details on the company because I'd like to keep it somewhat quiet until it has been officially announced (in case you were wondering).  This much is certain:  I like the people.  I like the job.  I like the opportunity.  It looks like the rest is up to me.

It's probably either corny or cliche to end with a song quote, but what do I care--I'm out of here.  So, I will bid adieu to the words of Green Day...

So take the photographs and still frames in your mind
Hang it on a shelf of good health and good time
Tattoos of memories and dead skin on trial
For what it's worth, it was worth all the while
It's something unpredictable but in the end is right
I hope you had the time of your life

Personally, I signed up a few weeks ago to see what all the fuss is about.  Instantly, I received a lot of "friend requests" from people all around Microsoft who are riding the Facebook wave.  From many people on my team to people I've met only a few times.  It was fun to laugh at people complaining about their cars or refrigerators.  Heck, I was fascinated to see where some people went to college or worked before Microsoft.  And true to its name, it did feel a little like looking at a live Facebook like the ones we used to have in high school and college.

On Monday, Alan Griver and I had an interesting discussion about what the future held for Facebook.  Personally, while I've enjoyed it, I didn't know whether it would "change my life forever".  I'd say blogging has changed my life in this respect as I have a continuous of my professional life (this blog) as well as my personal life (my Live Space) and even my journal as a baseball fan (http://fourthplacebirds.blogspot.com/).  But would I stay connected closely to Facebook?  Maybe.  Alan seems far more convinced.  He's a much more social person than I am (a "yellow", as he likes to describe himself) and perhaps this plays more into his personality.  He's using the mobile piece, twittering, biting people into zombies (if you don't know, don't ask), and joining groups left and right.  He raves about instances where knowing the inside info has helped him or a friend.  Now, maybe I am the curmudgeon in all of this, but in most cases, if I care what someone is doing or thinking, I'll ask.  I have ~20 friends at this point, which is fairly manageable.  But at some point, it'll get unruly, won't it?  Alan has 60+ friends and if they are each staying active, isn't that information overload?  It makes me think of the world's contradictions:  if we have all this diet food, why is the world fatter than ever?  Or if computers are supposed to make our lives easier, why are we chained to our laptops doing e-mail?  In this case, if we are already overloaded with e-mails, v-mails, IMs, etc., isn't Facebook & Twitter going to make things worse?  

My take: I think that answer is that if you use the technologies correctly, they can be very valuable.  It's like RSS.  Unless you are Scoble. you can't handle hundreds of RSS feeds a day--and frankly, that would defeat the purpose.  Ideally, you want the most relevant information pushed to you as it becomes avaialable.  I have ~50 RSS feeds, but on a given day, only 5-10 will be updated and that's a nice 10 minutes I read to get better informed on a few topics that are near and dear to me.  By the same token, I think there are probably a handful of friends that I'd like to stay in Facebook-like contact with.  For example, it'd be interesting for a development team to have a Facebook group as it's a useful mechanism to keep the flow of communication going (as well as get to know one another better).  I know I already subscribe to the blogs of everyone on my team to stay up-to-date on what they're thinking and I could see Facebook being an effective approach to achieving that.  And of course there are applications outside of business.  I spent last night selling the idea to my wife about how it would make for easier communication with the other mother's in setting up playdates or planning group events--at which time, she proceeded to waste two hours roaming all around Facebook looking for friends and old Stanford classmates, with the occasional outburst of "oh, check this person out..."  Yep, she's hooked.  Sorry Rupert, I guess you're right.  Everyone IS going to Facebook.

 Oh, and no, I didn't touch on the "Facebook as a platform" concept.  That's another blog post...

Or is he/she?

Sprint just announced that they are pre-emptively dumping 1,000 customers.  I have NEVER heard of anything like this.  They're basically saying "you are more trouble than you're worth and we'd rather you be someone else's customer".  At a time when they've gotta be losing significant busines to AT&T Wireless on the heels of all the iPhone defections, it's an incredibly bold move for them to do this.  I can't figure it out.  Is this a suicide mission from a PR perspective ("Sprint only likes you if you don't challenge them") or is this a blow on behalf of businesses everywhere that lose money on these customers when you consider the time they take with customer service reps, the concessions they demand, etc.?  You could say this is like insurance companies that will only insure good drivers or health people in that they need to ensure maximum profitability, but in those cases, the customers are pre-selected.  In this case, they were customers and now they aren't at the behest of the company.  It's like you think your girlfriend is madly in love with you, but as it turns out, you make her sick and she dumps you.  And she wasn't that much of a catch in the first place.  This is definitely a new twist on customer-relationship management.

Now personally, I had Sprint for several years and finally switched in 2005.  I loved their coverage, didn't like their customer service, and really hated their shady shenanigans regarding the termination.  In fact, I've had a grudge against Sprint since they charged me the fee even though I had been with them for seven years, claiming I approved a service upgrade less than 2 years earlier and needed to honor that agreement for two years.  Maybe I did it, but that just woldn't make sense--if I'd sign up for two years, I'd want a cool phone out of it.  They claimed to have proof in that they recorded the call, but I asked them to produce the taped phone call of the approval, they said I'd need a subpoena.  Uh, yeah, whatever.  Obviously, they didn't care that I was angry because I was leaving them anyway.  Needless to say, I will now NEVER go back to Sprint (something that would've been possible if they had gotten the right phones).  Given my experience with them, it makes me wonder--would I have been one of the 1,000 customers because the pulled a shady move on me and I tried to call them on it? 

I suppose any business has a right to refuse to cater to someone if they want ("No Shirt, No Shoes, No Service"), but I am definitely curious about those 1,000 people.  How bad were they?  Were they unfairly demanding or did they just need a lot of help?  I'm also curious about what effect, if any, this has on the other millions of customers.  Personally, I don't think I'd change if I were still with them, but does this affect the climate of trust between Sprint and its customers?  Do you want to pay $1000/year to a company that will kick you out if you challenge them too much or ask for too much help?  I remember a customer once telling me he went with Microsoft because, when something went wrong, he knew exactly who to yell at and he couldn't get that with an open distro of Linux and he didn't like Red Hat's ability to respond to his yelling).  Doing what makes the customer happy has always been the hallmark of a good company--or so I thought. Perhaps this will go by unnoticed. Or maybe this will start a trend.  Something tells me Microsoft won't jump in, but I could think of some people over the years I would have loved say adios to.  Maybe I can still be involved, just for the final say. ;-).

When I talk about the value of community for developers, I've been known to quote what I've come to describe as "Rumsfeld's Dilemma".

As we know, there are known knowns. There are things we know we know.
We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say we know there are some things we do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don't know we don't know.

Actually, it's also how I described my first year of fatherhood, but that's another story altogether. For the things we know we don't know, that's really what search engines are all about. If you know you don't understand what ActiveDirectory is, you will go to Google or Live Search (or Wikipedia) and get up to speed on the topic. I'd like to think our forums provide that abilityas well. If you have a problem and can't find it through search, you post a question and someone from the community shares their wisdom. But things get interesting when you talk about things you don't know you don't know. Let's face it: how do you search for something if you don't know if exists. Well, that's what I think this new wave of on-line experiences (must...resist...saying...Web 2.0) provides. Blogs, tags, voting systems like Digg--they all illuminate what you didn't know needed illuminating. When I subscribe to certain blogs, I usually assume they are going to keep up on the latest trends. I didn't know about twitter, but by subscribing to Steve Rubel's blog, I probably caught on before many people. If you are an ASP.NET developer, how do you not read Scott Guthrie's blog? If it's important to .NET web applications, he's gonna be the first to know about it and he's not shy about sharing it. My favorite example is someone on our own team.  I realized need to pay attention to Brad Wilson's blog a little more closely because he seems to catch on to things six months before I go on my little technical excursions. For example, when I started teaching myself Ruby and Powershell and knew what I didn't know, I kept coming up on Brad's posts even though he is on my team and I should've been paying attention in the first place (when I didn't know I didn't know). In Brad's case, I read his blog, but I guess I shouldn't have just been paying attention to the CodePlex-related stuff. :)

The value of getting information to fill the holes of knowledge is something the internet has always provided. But just like the friend that introduced you to your favorite rock group or favorite author, the internet can make the world's epiphanies your epiphanies.  This may seem like common sense to any who has made the internet a part of their lives, but there's a lot of people out there who haven't reached this point.  The on-ramp is easy.  Subscribe to RSS feeds.  Tag data and look at what other people are tagging.  Find your on-line trusty source of cutting-edge info (hint: it's not CNN or CNET.  If you've waited that long, it's too late) and follow what they are reading and saying.  Truly reaping the most from the web requires a level of open-mindedness and willingness to trust the community to know more than you do. Then, and only then, do you overcome Rumsfeld's Dilemma.

We hear a lot of feedback about how the forums and blogs should work.  And I mean A LOT.  Whether it's internal or external, people always have opinions about how to make them better. I prefer to think that the feedback is proof of how valuable these services are and that we have a responsibility to not only address the feedback, but look for ways to innovate as well.  So, for the past several months, we've been working on evolving our work to reflect the changing nature of community activity.  Our goal is to help people be better informed, better connected, and more productive.

With that in mind, we've release a beta (or we can use Visual Studio terminology and call it a "CTP") of our new services and you'll notice a new one in the mix. 

• Forums: http://beta.communities.microsoft.com/forums
• Blogs: http://beta.communities.microsoft.com/blogs 
• TagSpace: http://beta.communities.microsoft.com/tagspace

Tagspace is our way of recognizing the value of user-contributed metadata and how important that can be in connecting people not only to valuable content, but to other people.  The overall information, FAQs, videos, and other good things are here. As you can imagine, the features are not all there yet and I am sure you will run into bugs.  There's a lot we are still working on and you should feel free to provide feedback (our engineering goal is to get into "release early, release often").  This beta release is the first of many steps to get us closer towards the overall vision, but we'd like your help in identifying what's next. Over the course of the next several weeks, our team wants to use the new forums to have such a conversation with you on the questions above. We know we're not perfect, but you ability to partner with users to evolve this platform will result in a solution that everyone can rally around.

We're looking forward to the feedback.

It started when I met up with Billy Hollis for the first time in a couple of years.  Billy and I spent a lot of time together during my days in patterns & practices, but hadn't seen one another lately.  Billy, the King of the Smart Clients, still felt pretty good about the importance of client apps and the fact that ASP.NET did not need to be the lone choice for developers out there.  It was nice to get the gospel (and those who know Billy realize that with that southern accent, gospel just seems like the right word) that didn't imply that everything needs to be intermediated through a browser--which, in my moments of frustration on the topic, make me think of being told all food needs to be fed through a straw.  The next day, I met up with a host of MVPs for a breakfast that was organized by Alan Griver (aka Yag) from our team.  We shared some of the social computing stuff that we're working on and integrating into the upcoming releases of Forums and Blogs.  While the response on the new ideas was good, there were still many who loved NNTP and wanted it supported.  It mostly wasn't about the technology, but rather about some of the things you just can't do with a browser app, such as successful off-line operation.  I guess AJAX isn't that asynchronous.

No matter how wonderful AJAX becomes, it will never provide a richer customer experience than a smart client.  I know--there are those out there who will disagree.  Hey, I know I prefer poking around an AJAX site instead of downloading an EXE file, installing it, and then finding out it stinks.  In many cases, I admit that I don't bother getting that far.  But to rely on a browser as the sole means for access?  I don't know if that's an ideal long-term strategy.  Personally, I think it's the difference between the person you want to date and the person you want to marry.  A browser app is easy, quick, no fuss, no deployment hassles, install files, etc.  It is one URL away and, if you don't like it, you move on.  No commitments, no strings attached.  It's dinner and a movie.  A smart client requires deployment, installation, OS compatibility (though browser apps have to now deal with browser compatibility), DLL installation (notice I didn't say "hell"--we don't have that any more, right?). etc.  It's a much more committed relationship, in a sense. 

Many of my single friends love the former, but (and I suppose I say this as a happily married guy) the browser app is fleeting in the long-term when compared to the benefits of the smart client once you know you're ready to commit.  Once you are sold on the service, you have to be frustrated by the things you can & can't do in the browser.  All this computing power and I am at the mercy of my network bandwidth.  The sandbox nature of a browser is great when you don't trust a site, but when you do (as I do with Amazon, eBay, and several other established brands that have given me great customer service and earned my trust), it's incredibly limiting.  As one example of someone who saw this and wouldn't compromise on the experience is Apple with iTunes.  You would think Apple would rather create a browser-based application with a plug-in than have to support writing an application for (gasp!) Windows.  But they continue to write and update it.  Why?  Because I don't think you can build that rich an experience through a browser.  Will you ever?  Perhaps, but by then, client capabilities will have increased as well and Apple will have done something new that the next versions of IE, Firefox, and Safari won't allow. 

So what happens next?  I have a belief that technological progress is often affected more by trends than by need or opportunity (not always, but often).  If people believe AJAX-enabled browser applications are the future, the Smart Client becomes an after-thought and investors/large companies/etc don't want to go in that direction.  I am hoping that is not the case here.  I think the rise of APIs, which is thriving as a mash-up technology, could give way to an increased number of smart client applications.  An example that has worked for me in Flickr. I like the web API, but I've started using some of the smart client apps to handle the heavy workload tasks (like batch uploads).  The Flickr Uploadr is a great utility, but doesn't get the "ink" that any Flickr mashup gets.  Personally, I think the ideal would be to do what Microsoft gives you in their messaging offering.  To give Outlook & Exchange their due, you have two ways to access your e-mail.  There is Outlook for richer processing of data, off-line usage, and access to the hard-drive for archives.  Then, there is Outlook Web Access when you are on a kiosk or another person's PC or if you don't want to start up Outlook and just need a quick & dirty way to check if you have mail.  Personally, I use both very liberally.  I think you could make a really good Amazon application.  Or eBay.  Maybe they could happen.  Maybe I could beg Billy to write them...

Teamprise announced a complimentary license of the Teamprise client suite for anyone wanting to connect to an open source project on CodePlex. I can't thank Martin Woodward and the rest of the team at Teamprise for offering their great tool to our customers. This opens up CodePlex to a larger number of potential projects who in the past may have considered other open source hosting solutions. 

If you are CodePlex contributor, visit the Teamprise site here to sign up to receive the complimentary license.

I agree with Jim on the accolades for Martin Woodward, who I met for the first time at the MVP Summit and he's clearly a CodePlex fan (I'd have bought him a beer, but they were free anyway).  Now, if you want an alternative to Team Explorer, you're in luck.  I'll be very interested to see how many people take advantage of the generous offer and what the feedback is. Heck, I'm tempted to test this out on my old Apple Cube just to brag about how cross-platform we are (not that I personally am able to write any useful code on my Cube :) )...

I spent my December break reading "The World Is Flat" by Thomas Friedman. OK, maybe I was a little late to that book, but better late than never. While I can't say the book told me any specific fact that I didn't know, it's ability to wrap up the last 10-20 years in a tight package and highlight it's influence on where the future is heading is fascinating. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the level playing provided by the Internet open doors for something we couldn't imagine in my youth. Friedman does a great job highlighting several trends that have emerged that help flatten the world. But there's one trend that he didn't cover that I find fascinating and it relates to the world of media more than anything else.

No one needs a lecture on Web 2.0 (if you do, the video circulating on it does a great job). Simply by reading this blog, you're taking part in it. Heck, Time Magazine even named you "Person of the Year" (take a bow). But there is a line between official content and community content that I think bears distinguishing. When I compare our Communities team to MSDN or TechNet, I usually joke that they are "CSI" and "Desperate Housewives" while we are LonelyGirl15 or Diet Coke & Mentos. They are CNN.com and we are Wonkette. People should always care about the official word, but it's cool to see what the "common folk" have to say. In the last several years, the community's credibility has gone up and people are almost as anxious to see what they have to say as the official word. It's why I love this stuff. But who is our hero? To whom do we owe a debt of gratitude? Tim O'Reilly? Robert Scoble? The Channel 9 guy? GotDotNet? :) Perhaps. But there's a phenomenon that pre-dates Web 2.0 that, in retrospect, proved that we were ready. All hail Regis Philbin.

Regis?

Yes, Regis. No, not for his ability to put up with perky co-hosts or be David Letterman's foil. No, Regis put a bunch of normal people on prime-time with "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?" and made it work. Sure, quiz shows had a history of success decades earlier, but it was clear people preferred to spend their evenings with the Beaver, Marcia Brady, the Fonz, the Huxtables, and six coffee-drinking twenty-somethings in NYC. And the more glamorous and idealistic, the better. People loved the glitz of Dallas and Dynasty, soon followed by Beverly Hills 90210 and Melrose Place. Even Seinfeld, a show credited for capturing the humor of life in New York City, by the last couple of seasons, the lead characters were mostly dating women right off the fashion runway. Having lived in Jersey for most of my life, I can tell that there are many beautiful women in New York and very few of them went for "short, stocky, bald men who lived with their parents" (as George Costanza would describe himself). People love living in the fantasy world.

Then came Regis. He put on people of all shapes and sizes. They had personalities you couldn't make up because they were too genuine. But you watched them in a pressure situation and if you knew the answer, you spent the time watching them squirm with some level of intellectual superiority. You related to these people. Unlike Jeopardy, where the questions are much harder and there's no multiple choice, this contest was virtually dumbed down. [NOTE: I should mention that I think there may have been a UK version of the show, so I am definitely writing with a US bent] With Millionaire as a hit, Survivor was next and we've never looked back. There are as many reality shows as standard shows. The nation's appetite has extended to wife swapping, no-nonsense nannies, bachelors and bachelorettes, several amazing races, a one billionaire's really strange hair. Some are fascinating, while others are completely tasteless (anyone remember "Temptation Island"?). You root for some contestants and you're shocked by others. And because you can continually refresh the players, the premise doesn't necessarily get stale. We still have our fascination with the fantasy, but we're having just as much fun with normal people and ratio of reality shows to fantasy shows remains high. Arguably one of the best non-reality shows on TV is "The Office", which is a TV show about a reality show--almost mocking the genre.

The old cliche about Hollywood is that every actor eventually wants to direct. So wasn't YouTube bound to happen? The new media levels the playing field for anyone to participate and that goes WAY beyond YouTube. Wanna write a book? No need for a publisher. With a copy of Word, a copy of Acrobat, and a seller account at Amazon, your novel can sit on the same virtual shelf as John Grisham and JK Rowling. Got a hot garage band? No more waiting for the recording agent to catch your latest gig. Use ProTools, connect with iTunes, and you're set. Think you're better than Oprah or Rush? Host a podcast and put it up on iTunes and you could have thousands of people listening to you. You hear the stories of the great movies that came from shoestring budgets (including "Clerks", a part of any good Jersey boy's education), but now, it's even easier and there's a willing audience waiting to discover you. I remember once looking for the video for the Foo Fighters song "Resolve" and saw a bunch of amateurs covering the song. And you know what? Each of those covers had thousands of views!

Given this willing to break TV down to the "common folk", should anyone be surprised we've done the same for the web? So now, we care about what our peers say. Personally, when we released CodePlex, I was as anxious about what the bloggers would say as what eWeek would say. The world really has been democratized or, to Friedman's term, flattened. It's all a level playing field. And to think, we have Regis to thank...

It was a battle where we had some pretty nasty things said about us while we tried to right the ship.  Our first move was "Project Tourniquet", which was literally to stop the bleeding.  We then opened CodeGalleries and re-did the site design to usher in a new age of GDN.  Outside of a tough deployment in November 2005 (when we rolled out the new chrome/site design AND moved from 1.1 to 2.0) and a pair of weird hiccups in 2006 that each lasted about a day, we've reached a smooth operating machine.  I can remember when the tide truly turned.  After the November 2005 deployment (at which time, I was so frustrated that I was ready to shut down the site then and there), I wrote a service to ping our eight most popular pages once every 15 minutes and ensure that the site was not only responding, but doing so with something other than the infamous "Troubleshooting in Progress" screen that so many people. As the months went on, I went from agonizing about those statistics to getting excited as the numbers started getting really good.  Meanwhile, the general mood of customers completely changed.  I can't tell you how many glowing mails I've gotten from people practically apologizing for their previous harsh words (although they were admittedly warranted).  It's been a fun ride and we had some great uptime statistics in the last twelve months.   I look at Betsy Aoki, Jana Carter, and George Bullock (the three PMs for GDN during my tenure) and see three people that helped turn site once called an "embarassment" into a legitimate example of a .NET web application. In the process, I learned a ton about running a web-site and dealing with customer requirements on the fly.  You can say I owe a lot of my career sensibilities to GDN.

However (you knew there'd be a 'however'), the project we were doing in parallel with the rebirth of GDN was the birth of CodePlex.  As proud as I am of the revival of GDN, I am more proud of the soup-to-nuts story of CodePlex.  Jim Newkirk and I fought hard to build a site that would treat sensisbilities of a community developer as a priority and to do it from the ground up.  With CodePlex, I think we really nailed it and continue to do so.  As CodePlex approaches its one year anniversary and continually grows its traffic, the need for two communities from the same team addressing the same customers is nearing its end.  GotDotNet hit an all-time high in traffic the month before CodePlex came out, but has been declining since then.  It's clear that this isn't a conincidence.  So, this summer, we will be closing the doors of GotDotNet.  It was a hard decision, like having to put your dog to sleep (well, I've never had a dog, but I'd imagine it's similar).  Over the next few months, keep an eye on the front page of the site to keep abreast of how we'll handle the migration.  To those of you who supported GotDotNet and put such compelling content on the site, I want to say thank you.  And if you have any great new ideas, I suggest you give CodePlex a try.

Last weekend, four developers from my team and I headed over to Boise, Idaho for my second code camp. Having never been to Boise, I was almost more curious about the town than the Code Camp itself. After all, my image of Idaho was rural farmland, potatoes, and, well, potatoes. Granted, that isn't very worldly of me, but given I grew up in New Jersey and many people think of toxic waste, Bon Jovi, and the Sopranos (hey, we got Sinatra and the Boss too!), I guess you could do worse than potatoes.

Well, I was pleasantly surprised by what I saw. Not only was it a nice city, but there were a lot of people that were excited by what was going on in the Microsoft developer space. We arrived Friday and started with a speaker dinner the night before the event, where 40 or so people got together to get acquainted and get some presentation tips. Jason Mauer was the only other Microsoft employee at the event besides our team, so this was clearly a community event.

On the big day, we headed over to Boise State University for all the action.  Actually, before the Code Camp, I went for an invigorating 4-mile run around the campus at at 6am.  On the minus side, I nearly got lost and didn't have a cell phone on me.  I had visions of calling someone from my team collect and having them come find me (which I would clearly never live down).  Then I realized that it's impossible to get lost in Boise and found my way back pretty easily.  Meanwhile, back at the hotel, apparently there was a fire alarm and all the guests had to evacuate the building.  I was completely oblvious to all of this until I got back to breakfast.  There's a satisfaction a runner gets when he gives up sleep only to realize that everyone else got woken up the hard way. :-)

Refreshed by my run and armed with our Starbucks (grande sugar-free soy Cinnamon Dolce latte with whip--I can finally order that without thinking), we joined the 200+ people that attended (about as many as Tampa, which was another great Code Camp).  The topics were pretty diverse, with everything from XNA to PowerShell to the Mechanical Turk search for Jim Gray. It was interesting the see the trends of what people were interested in. For the second straight Code Camp, Ruby was a hit.  Also, I was surprised at how many people cared about Subversion and continuous integration (separate talks).  And agile clearly seems to be hitting the mainstream, although not always in a smooth fashion (see the panel description below).

Our team stepped up with some great talks. I missed Carl Prothman's ADO.NET talk because I was watching Tim Shakarian, er, TSHAK deliver a great session on Mock Objects. Doug Seven teamed with Eric Mahlberg to give a pair of talks on Test-Driven Development and Unit Testing and then Doug followed that up with a talk on REST web services (a very hot topic for our team right now). As the lone non-dev, I opted out of speaking (I considered doing the "Intro to Javascript" talk, and then remembered that I HATE Javascript).   Plus, since I hadn't given a technical talk in two years, I probably would've been rusty anyway.  Of course, that's the beauty of Code Camps--the pressure is off and it's really more about the community aspect than the polished speakers.  Even the seasoned veterans were doing talks on stuff they were interested in learning more than the stuff where they had tons of expertise. 

One of the more entertaining sessions was the panel discussion on methodologies.  It elicited a conversation that could've gone for hours.  While people had some great perspectives and it was fascinating to see how other people build software, I did continually hear my agile conscience (which strangely has Jim Newkirk's voice) screaming in horror at how many of the agile concepts were being misunderstood.  The implication was that you were sacraficing quality when you chose the agile route.  Plus, people kept talking about adjusting their agileness for different situations (not sure, but that might have been the quote).  With all due respect to those people (who I'm sure make great software), I'll use one of my favorite Jim quotes and leave it at that:  "Being more agile is like being more pregnant.  You are or you aren't."

Our Saturday dinner conversation was pretty entertaining.  Take eight geeks, put them at a round table, add a few beers, and start a religious conversation about C# vs. Java vs. Ruby.  It's rare to hear someone be so passionate about strong-typing vs. weak-typing (I prefer to think of it as flex-typing).   There was also some heavy praise and criticism about Microsoft products.  In both cases, there was just a tremendous amount of passion around everything discussed.  During one stretch of their requests, I had hinted at one of the things we were doing with CodePlex in the next month or two that addressed their concerns (stay tuned) and a couple of the guys nearly jumped out of their chairs.  The enuthusiasm overall was great. My favorite quote was from one of the primary community influencers there: "I get really excited every time I see all the new amazing stuff Microsoft is cranking out.  This is just such an exciting time." It is always nice to be appreciated.

One person I had a chance to spend a lot of time with Peter Kellner, an MVP who came up for Northern California.  Peter is an ASP.NET MVP and ran the Silicon Valley Code Camp.  We bonded on our experiences at Cornell and went into his rapid rise in the .NET community.  He's really thrown himself into the community with his blog, MSDN articles, and MVP status.  We discussed some of goals for Forums going forward.  Small world anectdote:  I went back and looked at a previous forum post answer that I gave a few weeks ago and as it turns out, it was to Peter's question, so apparently we had indeed met before--virtually. Peter is a really good guy and it looks like I'll have to make a trip down to the bay in October for their next Code Camp.  Someone mentioned that Code Camps were a little like the Grateful Dead on tour in that some people just followed them around.  Maybe that's where I'm headed (cue the music to "Truckin'")...

As for our team's work (with both CodePlex and the other projects we refer to as Athens, which includes the next generation of Forums and Tagging), we didn't oversell it, but we definitely did share some of the high-level work we were doing. Our support for REST interfaces is something that customers can really get excited about.  As I said to a couple of people, the user experiences that people build on top of services can often trump the original author's services (e.g., see del.icio.us and direc.tor).  I'd love to see the community build their own experiences on top of our platform.  We'll be releasing in early April and the feedback we can get from actually getting it out there will be valuable.  For those of you attending the MVP Summit, we're planning to host a couple of breakfasts to share what we are doing and give a sneak preview of Athens. So if you're coming to Redmond and want the sneak peek, let me know.

We closed out with some team bonding Saturday night and flew back Sunday morning.  It was another very valuable event and less than 48 hours away from my family--I highly recommend attending a Code Camp.  Oh, and about the Idaho potatoes, the waitress at a restaurant we went to claimed that the potatoes that they used were actually grown in Oregon.  So much for stereotypes...