I promised a week of surprises and I have one final surprise for all of you.  It is with a very heavy heart that I say farewell to Microsoft.  Twelve years ago Microsoft hired me right out of college and it has been an amazing ride ever since.  My days in test helping to ship such components as OLE Automation and CLR 1.0 and 1.1.  My transition to dev to help build and ship Windows Communication Foundation 3.0 and Microsoft Identity Lifecycle Manager "2".  It has been one crazy rollercoaster.

However, recently I have been on an even crazier rollercoaster with my daughter.  This has often led to making decisions between spending time on work or time with my daughter.  Over the next year or two my daughter will be entering a very important developmental window where we will be working towards preparing her for school.  During this time a very focused effort on her can have an incredible positive impact on her life long term.

That being the case, I have decided to step away from Microsoft and devote myself full-time to my daughter during this very precious, and limited, developmental window of her life.  I step away from the role of Software Design Engineer to take on a variety of roles that are best summed up as Stay-At-Home Dad.

It has truly been a pleasure working with all everyone over the past twelve years.  I know it sounds like cheerleading to talk about how we have changed the world with our software, but I honestly believe that we can make that claim.  The CLR changed how software was written with the introduction of managed code and made it easier to write complex software.  The WCF provided a mechanism to abstract the communication layer of distributed applications in a similar manner to how the data and UI layers are separated (again making it easier to write distributed applications).  ILM "2" will change the way that identity management is done within the enterprise and has the potential to change the way identity aware applications are written.

My last day was today (Friday, November 7).  For those of you following the development of ILM "2", especially the integration with Windows Workflow Foundation, fear not.  I leave you in good hands.  Assuming that I still have access to post here I will be providing a pointer to my replacement's blog as soon as it is available.  Until then there is always Bobby and Nima's Blog.  (Had to get one last shot in you two! :) )  Thank you again for all the support and great questions that kept me posting.  Good luck with all of you endeavors and I hope to hear great things of how ILM "2", and its integration with WF, is being used to solve amazing problems!