"Who I Am and What I Do Around Here?"

Ok…if you’ve been following my blog over the years you may have some idea of who I am and my current role/job at Microsoft. This post is to help shed some light on the topic and also is cross posted to another blog I’m just starting up that is focused on SharePoint for Developers. You should be able to find this post on https://blogs.technet.com/sharepointexperts as well as https://blogs.msdn.com/benko, which is syndicated on my site at https://www.benkotips.com.

One question I sometimes ask is what was your first computer? I can say that the first computer I worked with was an old Commodore CPM machine that a friend of mine had at his house over summer vacation. It was a school machine that his parents who were teachers were able to bring home and that we quickly appropriated to our own purposes. Starting with loading games from a cassette tape player to typing in code we found in magazines, we figured out how to customize and make the computer do things. The language was Basic, and to check and change memory you’d peek and poke specific locations.

When school started back up and the computer was no longer available I was able to convince my parents to invest in a Commodore Vic 20…this was an 8 color machine (6 more than the CPM) and simply plugged into a TV for a monitor. I used this machine until we upgraded to the C64 (https://www.c64.com) which again gave us another magnitude of memory and graphics capabilities. Woot!

Well to keep a long story short I won’t go thru all the gyrations and twisted path that led me thru school and my early professional life, except to say that I eventually found myself as a partner in a computer consulting company with my brother. As a  business owner you do a lot of things, but what I enjoyed the most was when I could get into building code. The challenge of figuring out how to write supportable, deployable scalable applications and infrastructure was not only fun, it keeps you learning as the tools change and new technologies become available.

In 2004 I saw an opportunity to be a “Technical Presenter” for events that Microsoft puts on in the developer community. This role allowed me to dive into new tools and share with other developers around the US how to best leverage their capabilities. I started with this on the MSDN team of Microsoft Across America which was focused on delivering these seminars. I remember my first event in San Jose, where I lost my voice but was saved by a patient audience who gave me their time & attention as we talked about hackers and application security exploits.

Since then I’ve been one of the faces of MSDN Events and Webcasts, and have a webcast show on Wednesdays called “BenkoTIPS Live & On Demand” that brings the MSDN content to developers when and where they want to catch it. We cover the full gambit of technologies drawing from the MSDN Events that we are also delivering live to audiences around the US. One of the series of webcast that I worked on with Lynn Langit was on SharePoint for Developers and started right after we released Microsoft Office 2007 SharePoint Server (MOSS). This series has grown to about 17 webcasts and is due for a refresh when the next release of MOSS becomes available.

In the meantime, I’ll be on the road and online to help provide the developer community with info on how to take advantage of the new tools and and technologies to simplify their jobs. From XAML to WCF, from SharePoint to Win7 to IE8, from Visual Studio to Expression Suite, you can join me to explore the possible both live and online!