What’s the Deal with Mike Benkovich?

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!