A brief note about my new job

I generally don't use my blog to talk about non-technical topics, but I wanted to take a moment to talk about my new job and team at Microsoft. About a month ago I swiched from the Windows Embedded team to the Windows Media Center team. In addition to switching groups, I also switched roles - moving from testing to program management. I have been a tester for my entire career at Microsoft up until now, but switching roles is not going to dampen my passion for quality. I feel very strongly that passion for quality, customer focus and problem solving are valuable traits for all job types at Microsoft and I'm planning to approach my new role with the same values and priorities I brought to my previous roles.

My role on the Windows Media Center team also brings me back to a setup team. I will be working on setup for the Windows XP Media Center Edition and also for Media Center features that will ship in future versions of Windows. It will be interesting to transition from the Embedded team (which is a part of the Windows Core OS division that produces setup technologies for everyone to use) to the Media Center team (which will be consuming the technologies created by my old division). It is also going to be interesting working on slightly different types of setup technologies than I did on the Visual Studio and .NET Framework setup team. Media Center use INF-based installation technologies (OCM and update.exe). I am able to bring some of my background working on the .NET Framework OCM packages that shipped in Windows XP Media Center and Tablet PC Editions (for v1.0) and Windows Server 2003 (for v1.1). I'm also working closely with the new setup technologies being introduced in Longhorn.

So, in the future, I'll be blogging about Windows Media Center features and development in addition to topics I've posted about in the past such as Windows Embedded, Visual Studio and .NET Framework, and general setup and deployment issues and troubleshooting.