After a very long hiatus, I am very happy to report my return to regular blogging. The book is now done, some of my major projects are either completed or winding down, and I'll have time to write, post and add screencasts.
So what have I been doing for the past year? Last summer, I took on a new role as an Architect in DPE Platform Incubation Team. I've spent the last year working on solving difficult problems and working on interesting projects. This has hands down been my most intellectually rewarding year in the company. While you won't hear publicly about alot of my work, there are some things I've contributed to that have been entering the public view recently.
I've been doing alot of work with teams in the company doing mashups and mashup events. Last December I wrote 5 'blocks' for a product we had in development that's now been launched over at http://www.popfly.com. I believe it's still on an invite only basis. If you've been on the site, you know it's pretty cool stuff. If you haven't, I believe it's still in an 'invite only' mode. If it is, let me know, as I've got a couple of invites I can share.
In addition, I ended up modifying the dasBlog engine and starting another site. That site http://www.mashupguy.com, is something you may have seen at various conferences this year. I wrote a number of labs that show how to work with various Live APIs, checked out a number of third party services, found some videos, and brought them altogether on that site. It's been used as a resource for everything from the MVP Summit to Mix07 to the Web2Open at O'Reilly's Web 2.0 Conference earlier this year. I've been pretty quiet about the site outside of those events, and plan to migrate it over to silverlight when I get back from Europe later this summer.
I also had a chance to do some work with the folks over at Windows Live and worked with Koji Kato to get LiveInABox published. Specifically, I wrote some workflow activities that wrapped Live Expo and Live Search and generated an aggregate RSS feed and RSS client for them. In addition to being on CodePlex, we've managed to get VPCs hosted in the cloud for folks to try out.
I did have a chance to work with another one of our online properties as well, and expect to see some impact from one of our projects before the year is out.
In addition to cutting back on blogging, I also cut back my public speaking engagements this year, with just one exception. I had worked with the great folks over at Dollar Thrifty Auto Group last year and one of their architects asked if I'd be interested in coming to deliver a keynote at the Tulsa code camp, so I flew out to Tulsa for the day (an interesting route from Seattle) and had a chance to talk about CardSpace. For private speaking engagements, I was pretty engaged at a number of our internal events, and recently was interviewed for some of our internal videos for Engineering Excellence and Innovation.
My largest project, you won't hear anything about anytime soon, but I was honored to find out recently that I was nominated for 2 awards for it, Microsoft's Circle of Excellence Award and the Customer Partner Experience Award.
And then there's the book... with my change in role last year, I ended up spending much more time outside the office working on the research and writing of the book. The book, initially targeted for March, was pushed to June when content grew from the 300 pages I committed to, to almost twice that. Expect to hear (and see) more about the book over the next week or so.
So blogging will resume starting today, the blog will likely go through a site redesign later in the month, using the new template I created for mashupguy.com, and I'll be expanding the scope beyond framework 3.0, where things have been for the past year and a half or so.
Glad to be back, and happy to have you reading,
Marc