Well, a lot of things have happened since I updated last about work. The first thing was that I was happily sent to PDC 2005 in Los Angeles this past September. I spent most of my time helping people out with the hands on labs and attempted to answer customer questions. Since ASP.NET 2.0 has been pretty well advertised in the community, with usable beta downloads, most of the excitement in our area was about Atlas, the brand new thing. It's the ASP.NET team's hand in the AJAX pool that's become so popular lately. One of our architects has put up a pretty cool site called Virtual Places that showcases what you can do with Virtual Earth + Atlas.
The next big thing was that Visual Studio 2005 and .NET Framework v2.0 (Codename: Whidbey) finally shipped in November, and we were given three days off in October as well as a nice ship party. I'm looking forward to my first ship-it award!
And finally, I was asked if I was interested in changing over to the IIS team, since they're short testers, and ASP.NET has slightly less of a workload now that the big release is done. I decided that working on something new would be interesting and probably the right career move, so I'm now a tester on the new Admin UI for IIS7! I can't find screenshots online, which probably means I'm not allowed to post them, but I'll say that it's brand new and really cool! Unfortunately, it also means I have to fight my resistence to new operating systems and do most of my work on a Longhorn machine. Oh well.
The next big thing was that Visual Studio 2005 and .NET Framework v2.0 (Codename: Whidbey) finally shipped in November, and we were given three days off in October as well as a nice ship party. I'm looking forward to my first ship-it award!
And finally, I was asked if I was interested in changing over to the IIS team, since they're short testers, and ASP.NET has slightly less of a workload now that the big release is done. I decided that working on something new would be interesting and probably the right career move, so I'm now a tester on the new Admin UI for IIS7! I can't find screenshots online, which probably means I'm not allowed to post them, but I'll say that it's brand new and really cool! Unfortunately, it also means I have to fight my resistence to new operating systems and do most of my work on a Longhorn machine. Oh well.