Just made reservations for Doug and Michelle's wedding in June. We're looking forward to a wonderful trip to the Northeast to see Maine! We'll probably extend the trip out into the following week if vacation schedules allow for it. That would also be convinient to roll into TechEd 2006 the following week in Boston. I may then be back in Boston for the Worldwide Partner Conference the following month, in the week leading up to Festivus Clevelandus, or, the wedding of Ed and Lorrie.
Speaking of things job related, Thursday was my last day at Levi, Ray and Shoup (LRS) . I'm moving out of consulting and I'll be moving into the product development group at KnowledgeLake , a St. Louis-based company specializing in document-imaging and enterprise content management (ECM) solutions based on top of Microsoft SharePoint. It's a very exciting change for me after 4 years at LRS. I'll be moving to a much smaller and younger firm, and I'll be getting to work on some things that I just don't have time to do in a full-time consulting role. Not a lot to say about what I will be doing (there is still lots of defining to do [this press release here , gives a good idea of the product suite]), but I will be spending a fair amount of time gearing up for the Office 12 launch in late 2006, along with some associated WWF stuff. In the mean time, I will probably try to hit the conference circuit to do a few talks and try to get some magazine articles published. I'd like to do a book, but I will have to do some work at work!
The great thing is that starting with Visual Studio 2005 and SQL 2005 going RTM this past week, Microsoft has a big, big year of rolling out some neat innovations. From the rapid release schedule of the Atlas product set, BizTalk 2006 and then Office 12, WinFX (rolling up WPF, WCF and WWF), all leading up to the release of Vista, it's a fun time to be a developer. There are so many technologies to focus on, it's a bit like a kid in candy shop for us geeks.
I'm starting tomorrow, and it's my first new job, so I'm quite anxious to hit the ground running! I'm not changing locations much, I'll be down Olive about 2 miles to the east from where I was at, on the 7th floor of the Microsoft building. I'm trying to finalize all the prep I need to be doing for tomorrow, and I'll be honest... I'm a bit nervous.
I also will be moving all tech postings over to my geek blog, available at http://www.geekswithblogs.com/mattw, and keeping all of my personal musings and whot not over at http://www.winksquared.com , along with plenty of cute pictures of Grace.