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Well, as I wrote before , today is my last day at Microsoft. Last night we had our office Holiday party in the observation deck and lounge of the Space Needle. The party was just fantastic and we were lucky to have a nice clear evening with spectacular views. What a great way to go! I had a brief exit interview where I handed over my badge with an air of finality. However, I am still an employee until midnight tonight. So it’s not so final just yet. Which is a good thing as the NuGet team is working to deploy the new NuGet.org gallery tonight if all goes well. Once that’s been up for a few days and we’re comfortable with it being stable, we’ll release NuGet 1.6. In the meanwhile, my office has been razed of all the good equipment including my...

It’s not every day you write this sort of blog post. And you hope it’s not something you do so often that you ever get good at it. I’m certainly sucking up a storm here. Just last month I hit my four year mark at Microsoft . I reflected on the sheer joy I experienced working with such smart people on cool projects. I’ve been very lucky and fortunate to be able to speak about these projects at many conferences, meeting so many interesting attendees. It’s been a real blast. Today, I write a different sort of post. It was a tough decision to make, but I’ve decided to leave Microsoft to try something different. This is my last week as a Microsoft employee. On Monday, December 5, 2011 I’ll come into the office, hand over my card key, the launch codes...

Once in a while folks ask me for details about the hardware and software that hosts my blog. Rather than write about it, a photo can provide all the details that you need. There you have it. Well actually TM , my blog runs on a bit more hardware than that these days. Especially after the Great Hard-Drive Failure of 2009. As longtime readers of my blog might remember, nearly two years ago, this blog went down in flames due to a faulty hard-drive on the hosting server. My hosting provider, CrystalTech (now rebranded to be the Web Services home of The Small Business Authority ), took regular backups of the server, but I hosted my blog in a virtual machine. As it turns out, the backups did not include the VM because it was always “in use”. In order...

As I mentioned in my last post , I have an overnight stopover in Reykjavik Iceland. After checking into my hotel at an ungodly early hour (which ended up being really late for me Seattle time), my first order of business was to head over to the Blue Lagoon . No, not that Blue Lagoon ! This one! Look at that steam coming off the water! The Blue Lagoon is a geothermal spa with a 5000 square meter lagoon. The water comes from a nearby geothermal plant and is renewed every two days. According to Wikipedia , Superheated water is vented from the ground near a lava flow and used to run turbines that generate electricity. After going through the turbines, the steam and hot water passes through a heat exchanger to provide heat for a municipal hot water...

If you’re in the Reykjavik area on November 7th, come join me for a beer-up. A Beer-Up is basically a meet-up, but with lots of beer! When: November 7th, 2011 at 8:00 PM Where: The English Pub ( yes, I went all the way to Iceland for an English pub ) Why: To talk about ASP.NET, ASP.NET MVC, NuGet, Software Development whatever geeky topics you want. And if we do our jobs right, by the end of the night we’ll discuss life, philosophy, and which direction is my hotel? Blue Lagoon in Iceland - Photo from sxc.hu I’ll be stopping overnight in Reykjavik on my way to Oredev 2011 . I’m pretty excited as I’ve always been fascinated by the natural beauty of such a geologically active place. I definitely plan to see the Blue Lagoon geothermal spa (pictured...

Today, October 15 2011, marks four years of being a Microsoft employee for me. As such, it’s time for a little introspection, but in many ways, Tim Heuer already introspected for me . Much of what he writes echoes my own experience, thus leaving me with less to write about. It’s the Microsoft way, or the highway. Which is conveniently located near Microsoft Way. - Photo by Todd Bishop , CC BY 2.0 Looking back in my archives, I realized I haven’t written a whole lot about what it’s like to work here. I do have a few posts such as… My announcement about being hired . I was really floored by the number of folks who commented (112) to wish me well. Thank you! Not long after, I blogged about drinking from the firehose . I blogged again at the one...

I had a dry run today for an upcoming presentation that did not go quite as well as I would like, though I completely expected this as I was unprepared. The good news is, it was a dry run and not the real thing, so I have plenty of time to adjust. Even so, there’s one thing I did wrong, that I should have known better than to do. In my crazy sleep deprived work frazzled mind, I broke the cardinal rule of a dry run – Treat it like the real thing! Kitty Hawk by gilderm from sxc.hu For example, I have a little pre-flight checklist for every talk I give. I just place it in a file named preflight.txt in the root of each presentation folder and adapt it for each presentation. Even though I try to adapt it to each presentation, there is a core set...

Stumbling around the net, I ran into the “funny verticals” meme. These are typically a vertical strip of screenshots pulled from a movie or television with funny captions tacked on. If you do an image search for “ funny verticals ”, you’ll see a whole slew of them. Be forewarned, there are some very crude and offensive ones. For the lazy, here are a few representative ones I found to be funny. The first example is from the movie Inception: This is another one from Inception. There seems to be a lot using this specific sequence. And here’s one from the television show, LOST. On a lark, I thought it’d be funny to try and do a geek version of this meme. I chose two personalities in our community I figured would be very well known, Scott Hanselman...

I hate code samples in technical books! No seriously, this is bile I’m not afraid to give a permalink to (nor am I afraid to end a sentence with a preposition, so there!). Even the shortest code samples are a pain to type in. And if they show anything reasonably interesting, they’re probably too long to type in. Of course, nobody actually types in the sample code, they grab the code from the companion CD (blech!) or download zip files containing the code from the companion website. With Professional ASP.NET MVC 3 ( print edition | kindle edition ) we experimented with a different approach. We made our sample code available as NuGet packages. It seemed fitting given that ASP.NET MVC 3 included NuGet 1.0 as part of the product. The benefit of...

A few weeks ago I felt burned out and was in sore need of a vacation. I suggested to my wife that we take the kids somewhere and she sagely noted that taking the kids anywhere at their ages is not a vacation. Perhaps I should go somewhere on my own. Like a deserted lighthouse! Did I mention she’s the best wife ever? I decided to take a week off and mix a bit of “staycation” with my vacation. Spend a few days at home and maybe a couple of days away. The first thing I did was call up Hanselman who was game for a trip to Los Angeles for E3 . Unfortunately that fell through when we couldn’t score tickets (yes, we’re cheap). We did find some guy on Craigslist who could score us cheap tickets, but his badges looked hand-drawn and made me a wee bit...