It's been about a nice round 17 months (give or take) since I left Microsoft. Since then, Microsoft shipped some software, people have argued, and the world continues its revolution, rotation and other movements.
I know all of you were wondering, "What's Kent up to?", so here is some of what I've been up to since I left.
I do a daily newsletter for
Code Project, the
Insider. It's a daily email of news on the industry, developer stuff and more. Oh, and sorry, no RSS feed.
I helped
Bill Evjen (aka Writing Monster II) create a couple more books.
I did four chapters in Wrox's new
Professional VB 2005 with .NET 3.0. (Proving once again that
Microsoft doesn't have a lock on overly long product names.) No prizes if you guess which chapters I did, but I hope you like them. It also continued my almost perfect series. I realized as we were working on it that I have written on every version of VB since 5 with the sole exception of 2003. That I would have included, but I chickened out, and
D had to
finish it.
I did far too many (in my opinion) chapters in Wrox's
Professional XML. It was a good experience, I think; it just took too long for everyone involved. Bill and I had originally planned for it to be out last year, but schedules, our new jobs and assorted other events contributed to it not. Again, no prizes if you can pick out my chapters. One of the things I liked about the book is that Bill wanted it framework-agnostic. That means it isn't a .NET book per se, but there are .NET samples, Java samples, Ruby samples and many others. It may not end up being a must-have book for everyone, but I think there is a lot of useful information in it.
I've been helping out with the whole
TechEd Bloggers family of sites. Mostly poking at the back end of it, but I did also help out with the new look. More on that later, along with assorted complaints about CSS. While I am discussing TechEdBloggers, though. Don't forget to add your blog to their system. You don't have to be going to TechEd to participate. Oh, and if you like (or hate) the new look, feel free to let me know.
Finally (at least that I'll admit to right now), I've worked on a couple of Web sites for Microsoft. The
Coding4Fun Web site was an experiment -- an attempt to host information both on MSDN and MSDN Blogs. Finally, Dan came to his senses, and he's moving it over to being a blog-only site. Check out the new look.
The
Beginner Developer Learning Center is more of a standard site as far as MSDN is concerned, but is still an important site for me. The one group we miss in all of our discussions of best practices, language wars and datagrids is the complete beginner. This site really strives to help them out, and I know it will continue to get even better.
What's next? Dunno. Maybe another Alphabet project - at least it kept me posting. Maybe some of the items that don't make the newsletter, or comments about some of the items that do. Maybe something about the article series I'm doing for MSDN, assuming I do the next one and if any of them ever get published.