As I prepare for my new gig at MSCOM, I’m cleaning up things from my current position – archiving emails, making sure sharepoint sites are updated, things like that. I’m also preparing for my trip to Devteach next week (with a quick stop at VTDotNet on Thursday evening).

 

Anyway, I’m reading some old blog entries and noticed an article from Julia Lerman – who is going to ferry us up from VT to Devteach and back. She talks about inventors and puts me in that list. It got me to thinking – I don’t think real invention can happen without having real experience with the things you’re working on. I think that, for instance, my passion around data in general and LINQ in particular comes from the fact that I spent fifteen years building business applications. Those are all about the data – and for too many languages it's been just too hard. It’s why I recruited people like Steve Lasker to Microsoft. He’s been in the trenches, developing using our tools.

 

It’s also why I took this new job – I’ve been part of the community, but I’ve spent four years building products and now it’s time to move the pendulum back so I can refresh myself. I can take what I’ve learned about building products (and I’ve learned a ton) and apply it to our community sites and APIs, and use what I learn now building large scale applications to influence my friends in the product teams.

 

Thanks for triggering the thoughts, Julia – and see you on Sunday!