6 years is like going from being 12 years old to starting college or going from a college freshmen to a master’s degree.  Or going from 23 to 29.  6 years is a long time.  (i’m just in a little shock right now).

Why couldn’t i have started a week or two earlier?  It is always cloudy on this day.  Always.  Every year.  This week is when the seasons change (something we don’t experience in New Orleans), the clouds roll in, and the 9 months of gray begin.  (9 months over 5 years) / 12 = 3.75 years of cloudy skies!!  Fortunately, i head home soon for our summer family picnic (only 70+ people in attendance thus far), and all i plan to do is lay out on the beach with a ice chest and lots of sunscreen.  i hear the local yacht club is sailing again, so maybe they’ll remember me and let me rent a scott, 420, or most likely a sunfish for a few hours.

Time for the traditional Microsoft recap…

• QA on the Environment SDK (then called VSIP, now called VS SDK)
• QA on the Profiles feature (Tools – Import / Export Settings) – my first M0 feature, meaning i worked on it before it was coded into the product
• QA on the Extensibility team
• QA on the Core IDE team
• Drove the Accessibility Effort for Visual Studio 2005
• Assisted driving the User Experience Consistency Effort for Visual Studio 2005
• QA on the Editor team
• QA on the Project / Solutions team, completing a tour of all the Visual Studio feature areas (okay, okay, i didn’t own Help, but i helped analyze test case failures when Jeremy and Aaron were out of office)
• PM on the Developer Solutions (aka Power Toys) team, driving the Power Toys for Visual Studio
• Assisted teams within Visual Studio (aka Developer Division) in releasing Shared Source and Community Releases by authoring a framework for what sorts of releases go where and how to get them to the outside world.  (i did *a lot* of work here on internal guidelines)
• Kicked off the Visual Studio Tip of the Day series

And what comes next?  Who knows… we’ll just have to wait and see!  =)