Writing…Data Services: The Inaugural Post

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Welcome to my new blog, which (to be clever) I am calling “Writing…Data Services”—clever in the sense that I work at Microsoft writing the documentation that supports WCF Data Services and OData and Silverlight (and to a lesser degree Windows Phone 7). I have also written MSDN documentation for the ADO.NET Entity Framework, and, even earlier, SQL Server replication. Before I got to Microsoft, I was in a totally different industry (but that is another story).

I am currently supporting the following sets of MSDN documentation:

My Blogging Philosophy:

The reason that I am blogging at all is that my goal, as a writer, is to tailor content to a specific audience and delivery vehicle. In my years as a writer, I have noticed that while some content clearly belongs in core product reference documentation, other content is better suited for other channels. For example, some more narrative style content (here’s how I did “____”) is often better in a blog format, or even as a video. I have already published some of this type of content on the WCF Data Services team blog, but there are some topics that don’t belong their either. Also, I need to have a place where I can muse, “out loud” about things I am learning and thinking about and other things that I am working on.  For example, my teammate Ralph Squillace and several others on my team are working on a cloud-based data service that exposes MSDN topics as an OData feed. Along with Ralph, I plan to blog some about this as the project unfolds. I also need somewhere to post issue-specific content that I would otherwise have to post over-and-over in the various forums that I support.
These are the reasons why I am starting this blog.

As with any inaugural post, I finish by saying…
I hope that you a) find this blog, and b) find it interesting enough to visit again.

Cheers,

Glenn Gailey
WCF Data Services
User Education