To Every Thing There Is a Season

When someone leads with a quote from Ecclesiastes 3.1, you know some sort of change is about to be announced.

Friday, 28 Oct 2011 will be my last day in Redmond, and unfortunately Microsoft and the patterns & practices team.

My decision to leave Redmond was driven solely by the poor real estate market in this area. I really want to build a new home, but know too many people here who are upside down (big $$$$) in their mortgages or who short sold their home. This was not a risk I wanted to take. Some say the market is near the bottom and now is a good time to buy here; maybe, but the cost to build a new home is higher than I want to take on and a long or hard commute is not an option for me. I prefer a 10-15 minute traffic-free drive (doesn’t everyone?)

This was a very difficult decision choosing between a life goal of building a new home, a short commute, and trying to stay with Microsoft in Redmond.

On 29 Oct 2011, I’ll be moving to Boise, Idaho and after a short break will begin a new career with Gayle Manufacturing Company. I’m looking forward to becoming part of the GMC family and transitioning back to an architect-developer role. Over the winter I’ll work with a home builder in Boise and hope to break ground in March or April of 2012. The other night I was studying home automation; it felt good to look forward to building a home, something I have not felt in long time.

Leaving Microsoft

Leaving Redmond is easy (for the above reason), leaving Microsoft is difficult. I’m grateful for the opportunities I’ve been given over the last 3 years. Except for the Marine Corps, Microsoft is the best company I’ve ever worked for. I would not hesitate to recommend the opportunities at Microsoft to anyone, this super place to work.

I will very much miss the dedicated and very smart people at Microsoft.

Leaving Redmond also means moving away from friends in the area; I will miss you as well.

Staying Connected

My blog will continue with WPF, Prism, and enterprise development topics, and will venture into WinRT land as well. I’m looking forward to joining the user groups in Boise.

I will also continue to stay close with Microsoft teams and groups by participating on advisory boards and other customer channels.

Close

Microsoft and the people of Microsoft, thank you very much for the last three years.

Have a great day,

Just a grain of sand on the worlds beaches.

Windows Phone 7 Market Place Test Kit

I’m starting a new project at work today to deliver MVVM guidance for the Windows Phone 7. This is going to be similar to the In the Box MVVM Training I did in Dec 2010.

One tool I’ll be using is the new Windows Phone Marketplace Test Kit.

From the above MSDN page:

The Windows Phone Marketplace Test Kit provides a suite of automated, monitored, and manual tests to help prepare your applications to be accepted in the Marketplace the first time you submit them. The test kit enables you to identify and fix issues prior to Marketplace submission, which saves time in the submission process. You can use the test kit to evaluate applications that target Windows Phone OS 7.1 or later.

To open the Marketplace Test Kit, select your Windows Phone 7.1 project in the Solution Explorer. Then from the Project menu select, Open Marketplace Test Kit.

The below tool will open allowing you to run a set of prepackaged tests and provides a UI to import the required images for your application.

Thanks go out to the Windows Phone team for shipping this.

Have a great day,

Just a grain of sand on the worlds beaches.