• My friend (and hopefully my next representative) Darcy Burner is leading a group of congressional challengers in publishing A Responsible Plan To End The War In Iraq. I haven’t read the plan itself in detail, but I sure like what I’m hearing about it.
• Speaking of politics, Obama’s speech today “A More Perfect Union” was fantastic.
• Bioshock is getting a sequel. ’nuff said.
• There’s a new version of FolderShare out and I’ve got mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, I’ve been a regular user of FolderShare for a while so it’s nice to see it get a face lift. On the other hand, it’s been over two years since Microsoft bought FolderShare and we’re only just now getting a new version, which is literally nothing more that a face lift – this version introduces no new functionality at all.
• I was hoping to geek out vicariously via someone else’s hacking around with Singularity. Luckily, Matthew Podwysocki provides just such an opportunity.
• Looks like “Prism” is the new CAB. Glenn Block has two extensive posts covering a project overview and their first drop. I think it’s interesting that the Prism team is focused on building a reference implementation, and letting the framework eventually fall out. Reading thru the description, it sounds awesome. However, based on the massive increase of inbox throughput I’m experiencing since I accepted the new job, I can’t imagine I’ll have time to play with it. Maybe Matthew will start playing with Prism too! (via Sam Gentile – btw, thanks for the kind words on the new job Sam!)
• Speaking of Sam, he points to a series by Bob Beauchemin entitled LINQ to SQL and Entity Framework: Panacea or evil incarnate? With a title like that, who can resist reading the whole series? Err, I can because LINQ 2 SQL & EF performance just fell off my radar entirely. However I gotta agree with Sam’s point that he “can’t think of anyone more qualified than Bob” to tackle these questions.
• Tomas Restrepo blogs his dev environment PS script as well as a PS fortune script. Personally, I use Chris Tavares’ vsvars wrapper for PS, though I’ll gladly take an “official” PS based dev environment.
• I wonder if Ted Neward will get jumped for admiring Mort the way Nick Malik did. Given that Ted called himself Mort while Nick compared Mort to agile developers, I’m guess Ted will have to go back to his Vietnam analogy if he wants to create controversy.
• Speaking of Ted, I agree with his point that conferences are about people. As a python pre-newbie (I figure I’ll reach full newbie status by the time I actually start my new job), I spent most of my PyCon time connecting with people rather than trying to learn technical stuff. Also, I love Ted’s WHISCEY acronym.
• Speaking of PyCon, my soon-to-be new teammate Srivatsn Narayanan blogs his thoughts on PyCon. I’ll try and get to my PyCon thoughts soon.

I’m back home from PyCon, but between digging out my inbox, finishing transition reports and doing my mid-year career discussion I’m a little busy. But I did want to point at a couple of recent posts from the IPy team blog:

• DLR Resources is a partial list of links to blogs (where’s mine?), mailing lists, specs, whitepapers and websites related to DLR, IronRuby and IronPython. I especially want to call out Dynamic Silverlight which not only has lots of good information but also looks frakking sweet. Props to my so-to-be teammate Jimmy Schementi.
• Dev and Test Job Openings on IronPython, IronRuby & F#. We’re hiring, so if you’re interested in working on language development @ MSFT, drop me a line and I’ll make sure it gets to the right people. BTW, I hear the IronPython PM position has been filled.

In my MSIT role, I only made two business trips, a training session with Thomas Erl and Tech Ed last year. I did travel for two presentations last fall, but both of those were on the conference’s dime, not Microsoft’s.

In other words, even though I haven’t even officially started on the Dynamic Languages team yet, by going to PyCon this weekend I’ve already halfway to matching my total Microsoft sponsored travel of the past eighteen months. I used to travel all the time – the architect evangelist role I was in when I started this blog had about 35-40% travel. But boy I am rusty. Well, rusty maybe isn’t the term, but I had forgotten how much of a pain it is to travel:

• When I got to SeaTac Thursday, the Alaska Air desk was mobbed but everyone was just standing around waiting. Their computers had crashed and they were waiting for them to come back up. I asked an Alaska Air employee what the back up plan was, you know in case the computers didn’t come back up. “None” was the response. <sigh> I (and everyone else) ended up wasting a good half an hour before the system was operational.
• My flight was around 30 minutes late taking off and we had to circle Chicago O’Hare for a good 30 minutes before we could land. Plus it took 15 minutes for them to get the cabin door open.
• Internet service at the conference and my hotel has been pretty iffy. I’m not surprised by problematic wireless access at a conference (though it was greatly improved by the end of day one), but I wasn’t expecting hardline access in my room to be so bad. Speed has been pitiful when it worked at all. I called tech support (after the hotel staff uselessly sent up an “engineer” with a network cable) and waited on hold 30 minutes before giving up and leaving me a message. They called me back literally 3 hours later, by then it was after midnight. I was still up since I’m on west coast time, but come on!

Once I actually got here, the conference has been great (specifics on that in a future blog post). A lot more stuff than I’d like is going over my head so far, since I don’t have a grounding in Python’s language model yet. But getting to meet folks and chat face to face is the most important reason for going to these conferences in person – most of the presentation content will end up online anyway. I’m also getting to hang out with my new team – we all went for Chicago style deep dish Pizza last night. I think I’m going to fit in just great with them.

However, there’s one other huge difference between traveling now compared to traveling “back then”: I didn’t have kids before. Leaving my wife behind was hard enough. Leaving behind my kids as well is even harder. Explaining to Patrick and Riley that “Daddy has a business trip” and so I won’t be around for the weekend as usual was exactly no fun. I’m taking a few days off in the job transition to make up for it. Hopefully, I’ll be able to bring the family along on a few trips in the future, like I did for DevTeach. OSCON, for example, has been in Portland five years – that’s just a few hour drive from Redmond.

But maybe I should wait until I officially start the new job before planning my next trip.

I’m sitting in the PyCon keynote right now, but I wanted to take a quick second to say congrats to my new teammates for getting the brand spanking new beta 1 drop of IronPython 2.0. You can find out what’s new via the release notes.

After nearly two years in MSIT and six years focused on architecture across three different roles, I’m moving on to a new job in the Developer Division. In a couple of weeks, I’ll be joining the Dynamic Languages team as a program manager. This is the team who ships IronPython, IronRuby, the Dynamic Language Runtime and Dynamic Silverlight. After seeing all the their cool work at Lang.NET this year, I just had to be a part of it.

As you might imagine, I’m pretty excited about this opportunity.

In the short term, I’ll be primarily focused on IronPython, which is marching towards their 2.0 release. Towards that end, I’m attending PyCon 2008 in Chicago this weekend, though I don’t officially change jobs for a couple more weeks. Longer term…well let’s just say I’m going to be really focused on doing my part to get IPy 2.0 out the door and after that we’ll see where things lie. This is a pretty big shift for me, so I’m explicitly trying to focus on short term work for the first six months in order to absorb as much knowledge as possible from the folks I’ll be working with like Jim Hugunin, John Lam, Martin Maly, Jimmy Schementi and a bunch of others who I haven’t met yet.

While this is a pretty big role shift, I haven’t given up my passion for services and/or architecture. In other words, this isn’t the last you’ll hear about Kitchen Sink Variability, the ROI of EA or my perspective on Nick’s Shared Integration Model. Obviously, with the job focus change, I expect focus on my blog to change as well. I’m not exactly sure how blogging fits into this new role, though the Dynamic Languages team is pretty open and many other members blog (as linked above) so I doubt I’m going anywhere. I’m going to try and keep blogging Morning Coffee, but I’m guessing it won’t be quite as regular as it has been in the past. Unfortunately, I am going to stop coding F# for a while (sorry, Don!) I can’t focus on learning two languages at once and obviously Python is my new top priority.

I wasn’t in my MSIT architect role that long, but I feel that the “in the trenches” experience will serve me greatly for years to come. And of course, I will miss my teammates, especially Dale  who regular readers might remember from filling in around here occasionally.