As you might have noticed … not a lot of blogging activity lately due to a very busy schedule. Let me wrap-up.
After solving our Authorization Manager issues at customer site we prepared an interim release of our application ... which should be deployed by now! This iteration took us 3 weeks and no big issues had to be solved.
Almost every night for the last two weeks I've been catching up with the overload of content on the upcoming new beta releases of Visual Studio 2005 and SQL 2005. I managed to go through a lot of presentations and HOL's on both products.
And last Wednesday and Thursday I've been busy backing up all the data of my laptop to DVD. Backing up because Thursday was my last working day at Compuware. Yes, that's right … after 6 years of consultancy on the Microsoft platform I decided to take the red pill. I'm going to Microsoft Belux to be a Developer Evangelist. If you want to know on the role of a Developer Evangelist at Microsoft check out this post by Jeff Sandquist. It describes well what it is all about.
So what will I be doing in the next months? A lot of things as you might have guessed. I list some of them:
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From tomorrow on I'll be closely working together with a number of partners and ISV's who are participating in one of the Ascend programs:
The Ascend Program provides Microsoft industry partners and customers with deep technical training, tools and hands-on labs to accelerate the process of migrating to next-generation technology.
It's my goal to help them as much as possible to successfully build solutions in the 2005 versions of Visual Studio and SQL Server before they get officially released. Hence why building relationships with those customers, partners and Microsoft product teams will be pretty important.
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I'll deliver on site presentations to customers and partners, at industry events and developer communities.
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Together with the rest of the DPE-team (Tom Mertens & Alain Leroy) I will be driving Broad Customer Connection programs in Belgium.
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I'll also do my best to continue blogging and being present at events.
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And of course I'll continue to participate actively in the developer community by partnering with local, influential software developers.
So if you're a developer and interested in partnering with Microsoft or being active in the community, contact me through this blog. More community information can be found on the MSDN Belux site and its community section.
If you're interested in working in at Microsoft Belux check out this page. There is still an open position in our team. So if you're an IT Professional Evangelist ...