It's been a very interesting couple of weeks...

I attended the local .Net User's Group "Education Day" event covering the Model-View-ViewModel architecture pattern, presented by Microsoft's WPF Program Manager, Karl Shifflet, and Jamie Rodriguez .  Karl missed our breakfast meeting, but we arranged to talk on the phone, and he apparently thought enough of my e-mail summarizing some of the issues to forward it to HIS boss.  Microsoft dev. evangelist Bruno Terkaly has also forwarded some of my feedback on various topics, and we joked that I'd end up on some kind of internal list of "trouble makers" at Microsoft (I listen for the black helicoptors at night...).

My e-mail included the following: "Looking at forums and sites like StackOverflow.com and listening to questions at the end of presentations, you'll keep hearing confused developers asking "Do I need to learn Blend?"  "For data access, are we supposed to use ADO.Net, or DAAB, or Linq to SQL (and is that now deprecated), or Entity Framework (and what about the posted 'vote of no-confidence')...?"  "Are we supposed to REJECT the WPF architecture encouraged by VStudio in order to insert some MVPoo mini-framework?"  "Should we use MVPoo version A, B, C, or go with Prism?" etc. etc. etc.   Microsoft reps seem to treat these as trivial concerns because they are each focused on their own specific area of technology, not considering that a dev. team on an actual project is in the position of having to essentially investigate ALL the available options in order to pick the best approach for EACH area of technology (because their project involves data access, AND remote comms, AND a UI...), and they have to do this in the limited time available before a project is under active development, and they have to train all the members of the dev. team (who are generally NOT MVP caliber developers)."

The gist of our conversation was that Microsoft is aware of many of these issues, and has been discussing them internally.  Karl was also surprised to hear that Blend is NOT included in the professional-level MSDN subscription, and said he'd recommend changing that, which would be great.

I attended the first meeting of a local SilverLight User's group, hosted in Microsoft's San Francisco offices.  This was the first event I've ever been to, where the number of designers and design-related discussion had any kind of parity with development concerns.  Presenters included Scott Stanfield and other representatives from Vertigo, as well as design/devs from the San Franciso offices of the advertising firm, McCann Worldgroup.

I also attended the day-long MSDN Developer's Conference, billed as a "mini-PDC", covering updates to topics and technologies presented last September, and was honored/priviledged to be invited to attend not one, but two social gatherings, where I got to hobnob with Microsoft and local dev. community leaders, bending their ears on dev.-related issues -- especially after the first couple of free pints...  I reluctantly passed up a free pass to MIX, since I just can't justify the hotel and other costs at this time (and videos for the sessions will be available online anyway).

For the second time in as many months, I've gotten e-mail from someone who noticed my CodeProject posts, asking if I'd be interested in doing some WPF consulting.  This time the request came directly from the CEO of an east coast medical equipment manufacturer, and I've forwarded some WPF resource links that should help their devs get up to speed, and offered to put together a simple demo to illustrate some architecture and design options just for fun -- since many of the requirements don't seem all that different from another CodeProject demo I've been working on anyway.

My social calendar hasn't been this busy since college!  Even the ILLUSION of being included in serious dev. discussions has me hooked, as I discovered from monitoring, the "WPF Disciples" discussion thread.  You have to filter out alot of empty "banter", but I swear I learn something completely unexpected from that site at least once a week (variations on approaches to M-V-VM, markup extensions as a localization technique etc.), and it really makes you feel like you're sitting directly together with the people who will have the most influence in guiding the direction of the WPF platform.

"Princeton could USE a man like Joel."

     - Hope for all us unconventional interview candidates, from "Risky Business" 1983

I've been living off my incredible shrinking stock portfolio, hanging out in local coffee shops and restaurants with my laptop, working with WPF and other development technologies...  for too long now, and I'm itching to APPLY these new technologies and practices, to something challenging and interesting, working with people who are "smart, and get things done".

In addition to pointing out that I'll be starting my job search in the depths of a nation-wide employment freeze, friends have predicted that hiring managers will reject me because of my recent "sabbatical", but I think any company that would consider intense work with next generation development technologies on my own dime to be a BAD thing is probably one I wouldn't want to work at anyway 

I'm obviously delusional enough to think I can still afford to be picky, and there are some situations I'm really hoping to AVOID this time around...

• The New Number 6:  "This 'best practices' stuff all sounds very interesting, but right now what we really need is for someone to take over John's code.  We're down to five developers now that John got fed up and quit, no one undertands his stuff, and marketing has commited us to delivering a big stack of new features in eight months."
• How Hard Could It Be?:  "We can't spare any of our hardware engineers to spend a weekend knocking out this 'simple' software, so we want to hire you.  We've already done the hard part of defining the database schema, and we just need you to add a few things and get together with marketing to slap on some kind of pretty UI."
• Brain Silos: "Joe is designing data access, Tim is handling remote comms, Fred is responsible for security... you don't need to concern yourself with those issues, and they don't need to be a part of discussions involving your area."
• Plug-and-Play Developers:  "We're going to need to pull you and Joe off the project for eight weeks to jump on a new marketing request.  Remedial Roger's not doing anything right now, so he can fill in until you get back, and then maybe we'll have you split your time 60/40 between projects X and Y..."
• Sacred Tablets:  "I'm not sure what you mean by 'Agile', but we follow the process described in this 5 inch thick binder, written ten years ago"
• Invertebrates:  "Yes, we've all been saying for years how we should be doing X, Y, and Z, but what can we do?"

I have this fantasy where I work in an environment where we avoid doing things we already know are dumb before we even start, and where we actually FIX things we discover we got wrong along the way.  I'm not holding out hope for an environment as enlightened as Fog Creek, but a company should fall within some REASONABLE RANGE on these issues.

Some organizations believe they "can't afford" to spend time refactoring their development process, especially in the current economic environment, when its probably the adoption of a more streamlined iterative process, featuring cross-functional teams, relying on a smaller number of more capable individuals, that is likely to have the most dramatic long-term positive impact on a company's software development costs, schedules, and quality.