I think I must have set a record for the longest period of blog inactivity.  Boy, could not believe its been since 2004, time sure does fly.  I've been "meaning to" get back to blogging for a few years now, but you know what they say about good intentions...

I've moved over recently to patterns and practices after spending 18 months in Office as the Group Program Manager for Duet.  I made the move for personal reasons as I'm going to eventually end back up on the east coast if the real estate market decides to cooperate.  Fortunately patterns and practices doesn't mind distribute development, and we do it on a number of our projects - our dev manager, Ade Miller, even recently delivered a white paper on distributed agile practices in p&p. We are doing a lot of great stuff in Duet and I learned a lot in my role - pretty awe inspiring to see how the machinery of a huge development organization like Office works effectively.  But now that I've moved to p&p, I've really enjoyed the change back to a small agile team and to start getting my hands dirty again.  I had a chance to work as an IC on the first release of SharePoint guidance, and will be the program manager for the 2nd release.

 I will blog regularly about our experiences and architecture issues as we move into the next release.  We'll be kicking off development on that release in January.  You can find the V1 release at http://www.microsoft.com/spg.  We'll be focusing on three major areas: building enterprise class sharepoint applications (focusing on scale and supportability), content oriented SharePoint application (publishing, authoring, and composition), and integrating line of business data with SharePoint.  Our codeplex project is at www.codeplex.com/spg, and we'll be doing bi-weekly drops for review and input once we get moving as is typical for a p&p project. 

 Talk to you soon!