The blog of dlaa.me

The administrators of the MSDN blogging platform are performing a software upgrade and will be putting all blogs into read-only mode on Sunday, May 16th. New posts and new comments will not be possible for this blog during the transition. The upgrade is expected to finish by Monday, May 24th - but difficulties during the migration could push that date back. I'll post a quick note once the dust has settled and things are back to normal.

In the meantime, you should be able to contact me using the old platform's email form. Alternatively, I can be reached on Twitter as @DavidAns.

Thank you for your patience - see you on the other side! :)

Until today, I'd never gotten around to signing up for Twitter. After all, there are only so many hours in the day... But then Pete Brown (or should I say Pete_Brown??) stopped by my office for a quick visit and the topic of Twitter came up. Pete explained that he thought that Twitter would be a good way to help get the word out about Charting - and interact more directly with customers in general.

Sigh... he had me at "charting". So I've finally created a Twitter account: I'm DavidAns.

To set expectations appropriately, it is not intended to be a personal account (just like this is not a personal blog). You're not going to see posts about what I ate for breakfast, what bar I'm drinking at, or what I think about the guy who cut me off in traffic. Instead, my intent is to use Twitter like my blog - as a way to share cool coding tricks, .NET development tidbits, handy tools, and the like.

That said, I realize Twitter is a more socially interactive environment than a blog, so I can't promise everything I write will be 100% educational. :) But I'll definitely try to bias things way more toward signal than noise.

So if you're on Twitter and have a question for me you've been dying to ask, this is your lucky day. If not, don't worry - I'll continue to blog and answer any questions that come up there!

My new team (affectionately known as the Agility Team (not to be confused with the A-Team)) is small and new and kind of different from the typical Microsoft team. I've been asked what it's all about, but haven't really had a clear, concise answer until now. My new manager, Shawn Burke, just wrote a post in which he outlines the nature and purpose of the team. He even gives a brief description of our current project which, if you've been paying close attention, was hinted at by Scott Guthrie in a recent post about Atlas. Like Shawn says in his post, this project is pretty cool stuff and I'm really looking forward to seeing what customers do with it once they get their hands on it. "I love it when a plan comes together!"

Truth be told, I'm still not sure how I feel about the use of blogs as a medium for technical discourse... But sometimes the best way to learn about something is to do it, so I'm starting my own blog and we'll see where it takes me. I'm going to try to stay focused on technology and coding and would like to post new content a few times each week. I'll definitely try to keep up with any comments that people are generous enough to post. Other than that, I have no particular agenda; topics will probably be drawn from my daily experiences and based on my areas of interest.

My work experience at Microsoft: maintenance and development of the Windows CE Pocket Internet Explorer application (including the addition of JScript support and a DOM), some work on the Windows CE Terminal Server Client, considerable work on the cellular infrastructure for the Windows Mobile Smartphone and Pocket PC devices (including radio interfaces, SMS, and WAP), and quite a bit of work on the MSN Instant Messenger servers (including application development and manageability improvements).

I've recently joined a new team here at Microsoft and am looking forward to playing with (and blogging about) many of the new technologies coming out of the Developer Division. I hope folks find this blog useful - I'll do what I can to keep it interesting!