It all started towards the middle of January 2005 when the SMS&P division purchased the source code for my custom controls. Needless to say, I was awe-struck when I noticed that the man, yes Microsoft, wanted the source to my controls. Of course, following my natural instinct of being nosy, I started a conversation with that person (name shall remain nameless unless he states otherwise) over the whole purchase to validate (to myself I guess) that Microsoft is really purchasing it.

So after a few email's and my slyly joking around about MS being my dream job and he stating there are several openings in their division, he promptly asked me to submit my resume. Sure, I procrastinated for about another week before actually sending off to him because I didn’t actually think he was serious – boy was I wrong. A few more email's from him stating for me to seriously turn in my resume persuaded me to sit down a Saturday afternoon and prepare my first professional resume (those that don’t know, I started at Integrity as an intern, so I never needed a resume aside from the crappy one I put together nearly 5 years ago now). After I sent it off, my contact assured me that he sent it to his hiring manager, who proceeded to send it off to the recruiters – in which they should be contacting me within the next few days for a screening call.

Heh, okay – so at this point I was just proud that I finally did what I had been telling myself to do for quite some time, submit my resume to Microsoft. I was content with just that and really wasn’t expecting a call from the recruiter. Ohh, but that next day, my phone rings and its my (first) recruiter who asked a ton of preliminary questions to gauge my knowledge, passion, and desire to work for Microsoft. About an hour later, my recruiter stated that he would be passing his recommendation on, and will be setting up my first phone interview with the hiring manager. Wow, a phone interview. Thats all I thought for the next few days…and so the wheels started turning on if this could actually become a reality. I started getting excited and the girlfriend (at this time) was starting to scared.

So a few days past and I hadn’t gotten my followup email from my recruiter, so thinking out of the box, I contacted gretchen to ask if she could figure out who my recruiter was and get me his contact information. Much to my surprise, she came through and got me everything I needed (Thanks gretchen!) So I promptly followed up with my recruiter at that point, who responded quickly and stated he was my recruiter. Phew – now that that was settled, I never heard from him again. Rather, I heard from my coordinator from then on (well, until after my Redmond interviews) only to find out later that he had been let go – could I have been his last recruitee?

Okay – getting on with the story…so that next week I was scheduled to talk with the hiring manager for the SMS&P division. I was truly nervous, and took an extended lunch to ensure I had ample time for the interview and actually eating. Overall, my initial phone interview went very well. I was asked about my past experience doing .NET development, discussed my personal business, discussed relocation, and well…I don’t remember much else, but I do remember asking if he knew when a decision would be made to advance further into the interview process. Much to my surprise he quickly responded stating that he did want me to come out Redmond for a days worth of interviews. Needless to say, I was on a high after that. I started getting more excited and my girlfriend started getting even more scared, but this wasn’t the end...

Stay tuned, part 2 of “Road to the Red Pill” will be coming out shortly.

Ohh, I bet your thinking this is a technical post, well…its not.

So, just over 3 days left at my current employer, and things are starting to round down for me. Less and less priorities at work (in fact, I am merely here for transitioning purposes to the remaining [few] applications left) has made this week pretty laid back for me. However, since I am going from one thing to another, I am finding that by the end of the day, I’m just plain tired. After reading one of Rory’s latest, it has finally dawned on me why I’m so tired.

However, setting work aside, its been an interesting last two weeks coordinating things with my relocation specialist, the insurance company (for relocation), the household moving company, the car moving company, the rental assistance specialists, and the PO box company (for temporary mail forwarding), that I’m finally glad things have all gotten settled. There’s finally hard dates for our relocation – April 4 – packers come, April 5 – house & car movers come, April 6 – my fiance and I leave for Washington. While it has been kind of crazy getting things coordinated, I couldn’t imagine doing it myself, so much props goes to my relocation specialist.

I think that if I had to relocate on myself, that there is no way I would have been able to do it in 3 weeks, not to mention that we don’t have to do a lick of packing (yeah, thats right – and what we do pack has to be checked out by the packers, seriously – if you’re moving long distance, get the packers to do it!). I’m only dredding having to tear down our 2 desks, entertainment center, and storage closet – you have to personally take all particle board furniture apart yourself (and later put it back together yourself) because of the possibility for damage. Seriously, its going to take us a few nights to get everything torn down, our entertainment center alone took us 4 hours to put together, I can only imagine reassembling it without instructions.

So yeah, life has been chaotic in the past few weeks, and I’m just going to be happy when its all over with and we’re out in WA with a new job under my belt. Until later when I post my experiences of interviewing…

Since pictures are worth a thousand words…

As you can see, GhostDoc isn’t 100% accurate on creating decent documentation.

Update – here’s a better one that really makes me chuckle…

So today marks my two week notice to my current employer, Integrity Technology Solutions. Over the last two months, I’ve been interviewing with Microsoft and have accepted an offer for an Application Developer position in the SMS&P division (which, if you don’t know, is their Small & Medium Sized Businesses & Partner Program division).

Wow, its been such a journey to finally make it to my life long dream company, in fact it’s still a dream to me that I even got an offer. I personally set out in January to just submit my resume just so I couldn’t say I never did, and now my fiance and I will be making the westward-bound trek to Washington.

As far as my interviewing – 10 interviews, including 1 screening call, 2 phone interviews & 7 on site interviews, it was one hell of an arduous journey. I do have to say that the interview process was more hype in the community than it actually was. I didn’t get any crazy questions like “how many manhole covers are there in NY city” – but, I did receive 2 brain teasers.

So yeah, my last day is April 1, with a new start date of April 11. We’ll be moving probably on April 5 & 6th out to our temporary housing until we find more of a permanent residence. So, if your out there at the MS campus, maybe we’ll bump into each other. I’d definitely like to meet any of my MS readers, so you can always get in touch with me using the contact link to the left.

I will definitely be posting more about the entire process later, I just wanted to finally get the global world aware that I’ve gone to heaven, so to speak.

So the IE team, specifically Chris Wilson, decided to blog something worthwhile about future support of standards, specifically within IE7. While I applaud Microsoft’s stance on standards, I’m just wondering what *else* would be implemented into “standards”.

Ohh, and what’s really funny is that I read this blog post in FireFox.

Get Netscape 8 BETA, or wait FireFox 1.0, no it is Netscape 8 BETA…or is it FireFox 1.0 – hmm, boy, just what I want to do, get Netscape which roots from FireFox…glad they can rebrand their products successfully. Reading the release notes indicates that it is truly that, just a rebranded FireFox browser (sure, with some added features – what about putting those into FireFox!)…see for yourself.

Side thought – didn’t Netscape have their own search engine at some point? Now they’re using Google’s search engine. Personally, I think Netscape as a product in entirety is merely just a brand that’s dying. Live long Netscape they say – nah, FireFox’s name sounds cooler.

Okay, back to Nutscrape 8 – ohh boy does this thing look like the MSN browser, thank goodness for skins…

So as you can see, it breaks all the normal windows user interface guidlines just like Apple does with iTunes. Yippie! Now I can learn a completely new way of surfing the internet, or just closing the application down. Note these oddities:

1. The main menu is on the right hand side.
2. The search section is in the middle, with only the option to search Netscape (Google?)
3. The location bar is small and on the right hand side of the search.
4. Where’s my STOP button!
5. The “Personal Toolbar” is pretty sweet, but  getting rid of it makes the browser look like crap.

So yeah, what are they thinking? Seriously? “Lets build a better browser than IE” – haha, right, thats not going to happen with this crap. Your thoughts? BTW, I’m promptly removing this rechid thing after this post is done. Ohh, thats now, good…

This should be filed as, “that’s pretty cool – I didn’t know that.” So for all of you SDK reading zealots out there, stay away - far away…I don’t want any comments (yet I have a feeling this statement will generate the fury that enrages them to post) stating “its in the SDK, just read it.” As I’ve said time and time again, when you have to work with the stuff day in and day out and only look up the stuff you need when appropriate, this theory just doesn’t work… so I don’t want to hear it, ‘kay?

So, getting away from my angst, I wanted to explain and show how you can copy (or clone) XML Nodes from one XML Document to another. This comes up if you need to generate a document based on another one, but you also need to add other items…kinda a “combination” document so-to-speak. Looking through the SDK, I noticed the ever ellusive “Clone” method, and its sister method “CloneNode”. Thinking about it, I figured – hey, that would probably work the way I want, right?

Well, partially…there’s another step you need to take to properly clone XML nodes. Prior to calling AppendChild, you need to call ImportNode on the destination XML document. This will then change it’s internal mappings to the new document. So, the code looks like:

XmlDocument doc1 = new XmlDocument();
doc1.Load(“Document1.xml”);

XmlDocument doc2 = new XmlDocument();
XmlElement docElement = doc2.CreateElement(“Document2”);
XmlElement docClone = doc2.ImportNode(doc1.SelectSingleNode(“/Document1/ToClone”).Clone(), true);

docElement.AppendChild(docClone);
doc2.AppendChild(docElement);

So, there you have it…a way to clone a node from one document to another, easily.

Mike Gunderloy’s latest book, Painless Project Management with FogBugz, was a much suprise present that I received earlier last week. Needless to say I was going to purchase the book myself, but was greatly appreciative to whomever sent it to me (thank you, you unknown soldier of the free book society), making my ability to travel to the bookstore pointless…but I digress…

This book was a very well put together manual about how and why things work the way they do within FogBugz 4.0. Because of its easy read (and the fact I knew a lot of the stuff already), I was able to get through the book in just a few reading sessions, or 2–3 days total. The chapters take you from setting up FogBugz and administering it to getting it to work with your source control system. The stuff in between, well lets say you should just purchase the book to get the beefy, juicy, sweet tasting (it’s Homer time)…wait, just some good ol’ fashioned readin’ about how FogBugz is best utilized fo’ ya team.

Mike provides a lot of How-To’s and Why’s-That in this book that makes it a perfect read for any newbie to FogBugz 4.0, or for that matter any version of FogBugz. Sure, the examples won’t hold up for older versions, but the concepts explained work with just about any version you would be running.

So, get on outta here, and purchase a copy!