Hello??? World???

"The time has come," the Walrus said,
"To talk of many things:
Of shoes--and ships--and sealing-wax--
Of cabbages--and kings--
And why the sea is boiling hot--
And whether pigs have wings." - Lewis Carroll

So yes, it seems the time has come to start a blog and talk of many things. To briefly introduce myself, I'm a Product Manager working for the Microsoft patterns & practices group. "Product Manager" tends to mean different things in different parts of Microsoft, but in our team the Product Manager is the primary interface between the customer (that's you, I hope!) and our internal project teams. Currently I'm spending most of my time on Enterprise Library, the new release of many of our application blocks that is due out in a few days time - but I'm also working on a few other projects that I'll talk about later. Assuming I'm disciplined enough to keep up the blog and it's interesting enough that people actually read it, I'm looking forward to using this blog to share ideas for how we can evolve patterns & practices to provide more value for your projcts.

If you found my blog you've probably seen these, but some of my blogging partners in crime at p&p include Edward Jezierski, Scott Densmore, Peter Provost, Eugenio Pace, Ron Jacobs, Jim Newkirk and Sandy Khaund.

To round out the mandatory introduction bit, I'm a born-and-bred Aussie but for the last year I've been living in Seattle. Before that I worked as a consultant for Microsoft Services in Canberra, Australia, working on some big .NET development projects with customers. I'm married (my wife Paula is also a developer, you can imagine how nerdy the dinner conversations can get), no kids but we have an estranged cat back in Australia under loving care of the in-laws.

Anyway, hope this will do for an initial post - wish me luck!