After two full months with no new posts, I’m finally coming up for air. The past two months have been some of the busiest of my life. Below are a few of the things I’ve been doing.

• Relocating to the Seattle area. At the ALT.NET Open Spaces, Seattle, John Lam warned me not to underestimate the stress of relocation. I did my best to heed his warning, but the challenges of moving a family 2,000 miles away from friends and familiarity are many. The initial months cramped in a small, temporary apartment were brutal. However, I’m happy to report that I’m writing this from our new home, surrounded by boxes yet to be unpacked. Now, if only our house back in Toledo, Ohio would sell…
• Starting a new job at Microsoft. Getting used to the rapid pace at Microsoft takes a lot of effort. In fact, new hires generally aren’t expected to be really productive until after the first six months. Though I have to admit, I really like it. It’s exciting to be working shoulder to shoulder with so many people who are passionate about creating the best developer tools that they can.
• Attending Tech Ed Developers 2008. After living in Seattle for just two weeks, I spent a week in Orlando at Tech Ed Developers 2008. Thankfully, I only presented one session, “Hardcore Reflection.”
• Participating in the ICFP 2008 Programming Contest. I joined Luke Hoban, Brian McNamara and Chris Smith for a full weekend of F# coding for this year’s ICFP Programming Contest. Brian has the full details here.
• Taking on more responsibility at work. I joined Microsoft as a Program Manager on the IDE in the Visual Studio Managed Languages group (which includes C#, Visual Basic, IronRuby, IronPython and F#). I work with two other program managers, Karen Liu and DJ Park, to drive the development experience of the IDE. At first, my primary area of responsibility was the debugger. However, due to some shuffling around, I have taken the role of the program manager for the Visual Basic IDE. Being passionate about programming languages and developer tools, I am enormously excited about this new responsibility.

Since I am the new Visual Basic IDE program manager, some of you might be wondering what’s going to happen to this blog. The answer is, very little. You might see a bit more Visual Basic code, but it’s always been here. The truth is, I’m a fairly multi-lingual guy. Before joining Microsoft, I was a C# MVP. Now I’m working on the Visual Basic IDE, and every morning I install the latest F# dogfooding bits. Rest assured, I still intend to post articles on C# and F#, as well as Visual Basic.

It’s all done in .NET after all.