Hello World...Again

MikeCarter — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 21:11:00 GMT

I may hold the record for the longest lapse between posts on a blog. I had such grand plans for this space and look how I've neglected you over the years. Well, let's let bygones be bygones and begin anew. My first "Hello World" post still rings true, so I have re-published it to archive where I was when I first started this blog almost 4 years ago.

Quite a lot has changed in my life since that first post. My wife and I generated two additional offspring, one female and the other male, rounding out our brood at a total of 4 juveniles. That's the count if you ask my wife, anyway. (We have 3 kids. The count includes me.) We recently moved from Redmond, WA to Bloomington, IL and I switched to a job "in the field", as they say. Big changes and new challenges...Lot's of fun.

ABOUT ME

First, let's get the the list of what I've been working on since the Summer of 2004 out of the way.

A little over a year after that first post, I shipped the features I owned as a Software Design Engineer in Test for Visual Basic .NET 2005. That feels so long ago now that I can hardly remember what I did. Some Intelli-whatchacalli-sense feature or other and something to do with writing VB code and testing something I'm sure...

The next product I worked on was called Orcas around the watercooler. You'll probably know it better by the name on the box: Visual Studio .NET 2008 For this release, I was the QA Lead for the Visual Basic .NET Editor and Debugger Features. (Capitalized for the appropriate effect...) We owned the LINQ editing and debugging experience for Visual Basic and some assorted other editor/debugger enhancements. To be honest, my job got quite a bit easier in many ways when I moved to a lead role since I had a team of people doing most of the hard work and I just rode their coattails to fame and glory. (If anyone from my old team is reading this, please realize that I'm exaggerating just a bit. There really wasn't all that much fame and glory to be had. Just kidding, of course...)

In the beginning of 2008 we made the decision as a family to move back to the area where I grew up. Having 3 kids aged 6 and under has really motivated us to move closer to our family. I'm now an "Application Development Consultant" (ADC) at Microsoft working out of Bloomington, IL. What does an ADC do? Well, when we have a Premier customer that needs help with practically anything related to the .NET framework, we're here to help and I try to be a very useful engine. I have to get the kids away from the TV...

ABOUT THE BLOG

My plans for this blog haven't really changed much, except for my motivation for posting. In my previous capacity, it was an "above and beyond" kind of thing to add to my yearly commitments. Blogging while on the product teams looks really good on a review, and I applaud those who excel at it, but personally I never treated it as a performance feather in my cap and it kind of fell by the wayside. I'm turning over a new leaf! That's all about to change! Ok, enough with the cliches...

I want this blog to be a place where people can go to find answers. Recently I've noticed that, in the information overload world we live in, the details are out there. If you look in enough places you may even be able to figure it out, but it's not necessarily easy to find answers. That is, unless someone had the decency to create a blog post on it. So, while it's not the most original motivator for a blog, I'm adding myself to the fray. I'll start with the problems I've been dealing with, but I encourage you to send me yours.

I'm planning a series of posts that cover various aspects of whatever non-work related project I’m working on. Each post will break down a piece of the project and detail how it works. In what I hope to be an interesting variation on the formula, I’ll cover how I came up with the solution as well as the solution itself.

Since I don’t know everything, I frequently need to figure out how something works in Visual Studio or the .Net Framework via the whatever resources I have available: MSDN, various web sites (ie. Google), other blogs, or trial and error/dumb luck. In an effort to help others figure out how they might figure out how to solve a problem my plan is to give you the play by play of how I came to the decide on the final implementation. Scott Hanselman recently started a series of posts on BabySmash, an application he is working on to learn WPF. This is a similar idea.

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day.
Teach him how to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. – Lao Tzu

I'm glad you made it to the end of this post. I hope you'll decide to subscribe and come along for the ride.

Hello Word

MikeCarter — Wed, 25 Aug 2004 22:58:00 GMT

I'm on the Visual Basic .Net Editor QA team. I've worked in and around the VBQA team for 3 1/2 years. I left the team late last year to work on another project and returned in early July to a whole new world. When I left, I owned the VB.Net Upgrade wizard automation as an individual contributor. When I came back, I find myself leading QA for the entire VB code editor design time experience...Cool!

This is my new blog. Very shiny and fresh out of the wrapper. I plan on discussing various topics in this space but most posts will have a VB.Net focus in some way or another. They won't all fit into pre-defined categories, but this is what I have on tap for starters:

Work Stuff...I try to keep busy 9-5 M-F and in my day to day activities I'll probably become involved in topics that the average VB user would find interesting. Also, since I relatively new to Whidbey, I'll run across an interesting new feature here or there that I might decide to share with you. You might also see a post here or there prompted by one of my "Eureka!" moments as I finally figure out how something works.
Play Stuff...In my spare time, I like to write code in VB.Net. Looks like I picked the right job! That's not all I like to do for fun, obviously, but the trials and travails of my at home development work should prove more interesting to you than my DVD collection, marathon running, hiking trips, or playing with my 2 year old daughter Paige. Those stories would bore you half to death and just plain suck. (Though I love telling them...)
Random Thoughts...Who knows, you may see a random post here or when I come across an interesting article, story, or random technological tidbit.

Stay tuned...

Mike Carter

Mike and the Power of .NET

Hello World...Again

ABOUT ME

ABOUT THE BLOG

Hello Word