Overture

Ok, so like with a lot of things I think about doing, I've been thinking about getting a blog going for some time. I'm only just now getting to it.

I'm a Consultant--that word is capitalized because it's actually part of my title--working for Microsoft Consulting Services. I was originaly hired--in November 2007--to do SharePoint development, even though I had no actual SharePoint development experience. I did have a lot of .Net--especially ASP.Net--development experience though, so I guess the powers that were figured I'd be able to "ramp" up pretty quickly. I'm not quite sure if I met expectations, but nonetheless, here I am.

Initially, most of my engagements were doing setups, deployments, and overall capacity and site planning for clients' SharePoint sites. While this was a great way to learn some of the intricacies and quirks of SharePoint, I have to say it wasn't exactly my cup 'o joe. I enjoy getting to actually make stuff, which is why I like development. I'm just not much of a hardware or infrastructure guy. Now, with SharePoint, it definitely pays to be--or become--something of an infrastructure guy (or gal--I don't mean to be sexist here), so the planning, setup, and deployment engagements were very beneficial. And for anyone who hasn't actually gone through a SharePoint site setup (and I mean starting from scratch, end-to-end, including configuring search type of setup), I highly recommend it as a growth experience.

If nothing else, it will give you a much greater appreciation for all of the people that do this stuff every day.

At any rate, after having almost no interaction with a development IDE for close to 8 months, I finally got lucky enough to get assigned to a development engagement. And with a team, no less! (Usually, our engagements are solo affairs, which can make for some lonely days and nights.) I'm now working with an in-house development group for a group that runs a large hospital chain. We've been development portal sites--using SharePoint as a platform--for both internal and external hospital customers. Ah, Visual Studio... how I've missed you.

So, back to the blog...

 Like I said, I've been thinking about writing this for some time, and for a number of reasons. I'll go into those reasons in another post, but for now, here's what I hope to accomplish with this blog:

I hope to create a common place for me to reference interesting ideas and useful articles in hopes that I and others like me might be able to more-easily find those articles later on, when we really need them. Hopefully, that is what I'll be able to do.