If you've been wondering why I haven't posted lately, it's not because I've been lazy (at least not overly).

I've recently been hired by Microsoft and have been drinking from the infamous "Firehose".

I've also had the opportunity to host my blog on the MSDN site, which is where you'll be able to find the new content for me - http://blogs.msdn.com/agileer.

If you want to learn a new Microsoft developer tool or technology, what's the first thing you turn to?  MSDN?  Books? Google?  My blog (well, of course you do, but besides that)? 

Me? I'm starting to learn to really appreciate the value of what gets posted on ScottGu's blog (Corporate VP of Microsoft's Developer Division).  ASP.NET MVC Framework?  I learned about it there.  jQuery Intellisense and Ajax?  I learned about it there.  Silverlight?  Well, if I wanted to know more about it (and I will eventually), I can learn about it from there, too.

I've subscribed to his blog for a good while, but it's almost better to look at it not as a subscription, but as a big reference library  of cool, Microsoft developer... stuff.  Subscribing and seeing the posts come out one at a time is almost anticlimactic, somehow.

Oh, and if you don't find what you need from Scott, you can always subscribe to my blog too: Feed your aggregator (RSS 2.0)

It doesn't look like Google Reader or FeedDemon are going to work out for subscribing to any of my secured corporate blogs (which currently only consist of my own blog).  Let's give the Windows Common Feed List a try.  Nope.  IE doesn't support "feeds with passwords" as it puts it.  Let's try Outlook.  It looks like Outlook is the only reader (that I know of so far) that handles this kind of feed.  Wow.  I didn't know Outlook had it in it.  Am I ready to leave Google Reader yet?  Mmm... not really, but I'll just have to have separate areas for public and private feeds from now on, however.

If you've followed my blog for very long, you've seen that it's mostly about agile software development.  I took a short "sabbatical" over the holidays and started playing around with SharePoint (both WSS 3.0 and MOSS), and I posted maybe 5-10 blog entries on these subjects.  Since then, I've seen a dramatic increase in my blog traffic - particularly from search-engine traffic.  It's now 9-1 SharePoint referrals.  It's not like there's not a lot of places out there to get SharePoint info.  I know that I haven't had a hard time finding SharePoint info in the Googlesphere:

but there you have it.  People are so starved for SharePoint info they're coming for my meager offerings (I must be 18,100,001).

It's all about marketshare.  I remember seeing something similar in 1994-95, when I was mostly a Borland C++ guy.  I loved Borland, but Microsoft Visual C++ seemed to reach a tipping point in marketshare around then and I decided to hop into a different boat - turned out to be a really good move.  Whatever happened to Borland anyway?  Funny, I don't even feel the need to look them up now, it seems so irrelevant.  But I did, and it looks like the used-car dealearship of the internet:

But unlike Borland C++ vs Visual C++, I don't feel quite the same tension.  I don't need to abandon "agile" in order to do SharePoint.  At least I hope not.  Agile hasn't made nearly the same in-roads in the MOSS world as it has in other areas of software development, so I kind of consider it a challenge to "agilify" (I just made the word up, I believe) the SharePoint world.  There's only one question left...

Should it be MosScrum or ScruMoss?  For some reason, I'm leaning toward's ScruMoss.

I really like Google Reader.  Why?  Because:

• I can do all my reading, etc. with simple keyboard commands (very "vi"-like). 
• I can easily search it.
• I don't have to install anything.
• It's free.

Here's my short list of what/who I subscribe to (Alphabetical as Google Reader lists them):

The list isn't very static, so this is the state of things today.  I just removed some that really weren't talking about things I care much about.  Some were by really smart tech guys, but their blogs were more personal/game oriented than tech.

I'm currently "in-between" projects here at the EMC Microsoft Practice, and partially through guilt that I'm not "producing" anything right now, I'm going to use this blog to assuage my guilt, somewhat.  I'll be using it (for the time-being) as what "blogs" were originally meant for, more or less.  That is, a diary of "stuff I do".  I'll try to continue to make it interesting, but it probably won't be as in-depth and as focused as in the past.  No, I'm not going to Twitter, since you don't need to know how many diapers I change a day (plenty today, let me tell you), etc., but I'll talk about each thing I work on for as long as my Attention Deficit Disorder allows.

Today I began by downloading code and watching/listening to some screen casts coming out of Microsoft for ASP.NET, namely the ASP.NET 3.5 "Extensions", which are really more like ASP.NET 3.6.  Pretty much the only thing I was originally interested in was the ASP.NET MVC Framework, which helps make TDD for web-sites easier to do, and that is always cool.  But there are other interesting things in these extensions as well, like "Dynamic Data", which appears to bring the Web to a point where VB6 was years and years ago, Point to some tables and "voila!", you've got a completely workable solution for instant CRUD.

I almost forgot, I have to do a phone-screen today.  In the past I've used the FizzBuzz test via Live Meeting, but I should probably come up with something a little more original.  How about:

Write a method for a console application that:

Performs a loop that goes from 3 - 99 by threes, prints the current time when the index is divisible by 4 and prints yesterday's date/time when the index ends in the digit 7.

That's a little harder (but only slightly) than Fizz Buzz, but still lets you gauge a candidate's basic coding ability, which is really all it needs to do.  The point isn't that there's one BEST solution, but rather it's illuminating to watch a simple problem like this be solved on the spot.  What if someone reads my blog and figures it out beforehand?  Well, if you read my blog, then you gotta be pretty good anyway, right?  You're hired!  How did it go?  You guys aren't the HR department, so I'm not gonna tell.

I've just spent more time than I'd like to admit finding a decent tool with which to write to my blog.  Back when I was using WSS 3.0 as my "blog engine" I used Word 2007 as my blog entry tool, but I've discovered today that it doesn't work so hot with dasBlog.  With dasBlog, I'd been either using the built-in web-based blogging functionality to dasBlog or BlogJet.  The trial for BlogJet has expired and I just can't bring myself to fork over about $47 US for the thing.  I just didn't get enough bang for that amount of buck.  So I'm back to using another free tool, "Windows Live Writer," which so far seems to work like a breeze, even with dasBlog.

Well, that's pretty much been my day today so far (after 5:30 PM here). Not that it's over. I'll probably be sitting here doing more or less the same thing until about bed time - or past.

Yeah, I know.  It's a new blog engine for me.  Sorry about the RSS spam.

I haven't sorted out ALL the kinks yet, but already it's a better solution for blogging than WSS 3.0 was.  If I wanted the site to do more than just blogging, then WSS would have been a good way to go.  But right now this site is just for blogging.  I'll keep the WSS site up for at least awhile - it's only $20 a year, so that's not a big deal.  Commenting support, email support, and ... it doesn't LOOK like SharePoint!