It's hard to believe, but I'm 6 days away from having been at Microsoft a full year. Time flies!

I had a great first year at Microsoft, thanks in no small part to the mentoring and guidance from great folks like Scott Hanselman and Cyra Richardson. Check out the first half of this podcast to meet Cyra (and Scott, of course)

As is the nature of things at Microsoft, we started off this fiscal year with news of a reorg. I've been told the only constant here is change; turns out that's not some empty cliché. That reorg is now mostly complete, and our team has moved to the Developer Guidance group in Microsoft.

In case of tl;dr :

Scott moved to the product team.

We've moved to a new org.

I'm the new team lead.

We're awesome. :)

If you are interested transparency and way too much info about our group, read on.

Developer Guidance

Developer Guidance (DG) is a new and exciting org made up of Developer Community (us), Patterns and Practices, and the MSDN Library Documentation team. The group is pretty close to Server and Tools Online (our old group), and reports up to some of the same people in the EPX part of Developer Division. Working closely with P&P and MSDN, and coordinating/reusing/sharing content is a huge benefit to being in this team.

Concurrent with the same reorg, but not because of it, Scott decided to move over to WPT. I'm pretty sure the job description for his role said "Be Scott Hanselman" :) From Scott's blog:

An a related aside, one of the reasons I came to Microsoft was to work on and encourage open source like NuPack. For the last few years I've been working in MSDN and STO (Server and Tools Online) most recently leading a community team with a great bunch of folks, including Joe Stagner, Jon Galloway, Rey Bango, Jesse Liberty, and Pete Brown. This week I'm leaving MSDN to go to work as Community Architect for the Web Platform and Tools (WPT) team under ScottGu, Bill Staples and Omar Khan. Pete will take over as the lead of my team and they'll all join Developer Guidance (née Patterns and Practices). We'll hang out a lot together, though, I have no doubt, and I'll be at the Patterns and Practices Symposium as well as PDC 2010 this year.

The WPT team includes ASP.NET, IIS, as well as open source projects like NuPack, ASP.NET MVC and Orchard. I'll be promoting Open Source inside and outside Microsoft, making sure the customers voice is heard as products are architected, as well as speaking and teaching whenever they'll let me. I won't be moving to Seattle. ;)

I'm excited for Scott and his choice to follow his passion in the open source space at Microsoft. We're doing a decent job in that area, but I have confidence that Scott can make even more happen.

With Scott leaving org, I have taken over the leadership of our team in the new DG group. Personally, I thank Scott for being such an awesome manager this past year; he's been both a great person to work for, and a great guy to work with. We still chat a lot (and will), but at least he doesn't have to review my expense reports anymore ;)

Meet The Developer Community Team

In the past, many people have asked us what we do as it seems we're able to just play with cool stuff all day. Well, that's pretty much true :) Most of us joined Microsoft because we had a deep interest in cool things we saw coming out of this company. Our main focus areas are:

• Quality Content (Presentations, Videos, Blog Posts, Articles, Books, more) reaching a broad audience
• Community interaction and feedback, driving back into the product teams and content teams while remaining authentic and true to ourselves
• Site Content Strategy and some management

As part of the move to the new group, I put together a five minute internal introduction to what we do.

I'm generally the "code on the client" guy. Joe does a lot with open source community as well as ASP.NET and scripting in general. Jesse is the Windows Phone and Silverlight guy. Jon does a lot with MVC and ASP.NET in general, and some work with Silverlight. Jesse did a great podcast with Jon back in September.

(Rey Bango is staying with STO, working on site management in Cyra Richardson's group. He said something about not being able to work for a guy who works out of his kitchen ;) )

You can usually find one or all of us online at any given time.

Events

The top shot in here is Joe Stagner giving a very successful keynote. Then you have Jon Galloway showing the world's largest dialog screenshot at CodeGarden ;). Below that, the speaker panel at BOTAC in Iceland in January (tons of fun), plus Jesse schmoozing folks at MIX. On the right, some random shots of support apps we've built for conferences.

Sample Applications

We all write samples, both large and small either officially open source, or just as code samples. Not all of them are pictured here (like some of the great MVC work Jon is doing), but it's representative. It's also fun to sneak Commodore 64 screen shots into various decks at MS ;)

Tutorials and Videos

Arguably our main task is creating tutorials and videos, both for the *.net sites (asp.net, silverlight.net, windowsclient.net, scriptjunkie and more) and MSDN itself.

Books

Many of us have at least one book under our belts. Some, like Jesse, need several pages on Amazon to list all the books written.

Blogs

We all have our personal blogs. We're somewhat unique in Microsoft for that; as most Microsoft employees have official corporate blogs. Most of us brought our blogs in with us when we joined, and have taken pains to ensure they remain independent, and that we control what goes on them.

More

We do a lot more, of course. Each of us has individual passions we follow within Microsoft. Some do a lot directly with the product teams, some do more on social networks, some do more events.

I'm really excited about the coming year. I have a great team of folks in a new org that seems almost tailor made for what we do. We have a great opportunity to continue to change things in Microsoft for the betterment of developers everywhere.