Off to the holy land, Redmond WA.

Well, i'm now into the second week at Microsoft and life is good I must admit. The people continue to be great and the support is fantastic (nothing seems as being a hassle, despite my "I'm sorry to bug you but.." pre-cursors to a annoying requests - hey I know i'm annoying, lets not dance around that fact ).

I've found that the internal Intranets and various web based sites that we folk within use, to be an amazing sight to see. I've heard comments from around the place saying things like "Bah, its alright but we could do better!".

I see where they are coming from, yeah it could be better but stop for a moment and think of thousands, if not millions of other companies out there that have a really poor attempt at having an Intranet. That being said, it's been absolutely amazing to see how my induction training requirements unfold within the intra-eco-system. Not only that, but I've been bombarded with so many internal sites "must read" that I've got a bookmark list so big that I spent 30mins this afternoon assigning URLS into categories.

I've already began my Journey on the Gadgets Path and have signed up to some internal Groups, that interact with the Development Teams in Redmond so I'm sure that will come to enormous benefit from here on out.

Finally, today I got the invite to TechReady (I'll be in Seattle/WA around the Feb 5th onwards. If you have no idea what the hell a TechReady is then click here for more info), which is basically an internal "conference" so to speak for Microsoft Employees. It's purpose from what I've read is to ensure we put face to various names within the campus (who's who of the Microsoft Celeb Redcarpets, but in a more geeky way hehe), but also to ensure we have a full brief of what the Microsoft eco-system looks like going forward (very important). I must admit, coming from the non-Microsoft fence lines over the years that I really don't fully appreciate the power of the products or whats on offer by the mothership. I say this as not to come off as a MS Zealot, but more so that its kind of a new found understanding (its true, Microsoft employees don't sacrafice children to an evil god, they...they...appear nice, despite what certain anti-MS folks say). There is a lot they could do to better to improve Developers around the world, and by the looks of it they/we seem to be putting in a big effort (my actual role is part of this) yet, the stuff that is here today, is not to bad I must say.

I noticed Microsoft SharePoint for the first time today, in that I've known about it, but realistically never taken the time to dig deeper into what it has to offer (hey Its all different flavours folks, some like strawberry, while others prefer chocolate). I was somewhat suprised and began to slap my forehead on some of the problems that could of been solved at my last job! You live and learn as they say.

Anywho, I'm pretty much nearly squared away and its high time I turn my sights towards more hands on development and less of this sitting back absorbing. I want to get my hands dirty and mix the technologies together, and spit out some examples, create some discussions and anything I can do to help turn some heads towards theRIA dream sequence.

So expect to see some more discussions around Gadgets for starters, but also how other technologies such as Adobe FLEX can play in harmony. I understand that, despite what Gadgets have on offer, there is the need to recycle pre-baked stuff within the web. That's cool, fingers in all barrells I say, so lets expand on this further and see what we come up with.

Looking forward to the next 6 months, the journey has only just began.