It was only two and a half months ago when I wrote about receiving my Microsoft MVP award. I was quite honored to receive this award.

In a follow-up comment to that post, rich with unintentional foreshadowing, I mentioned the following…

However, I would like to hit up that MVP conference in Redmond before doing anything to cause my MVP status to be dropped.

Unfortunately, I will not be retaining my MVP status long enough for the MVP conference. I have committed an action that has forced Microsoft’s hand in this matter and they must remove my MVP status.

To understand why this is the case, I must refer you to the Microsoft MVP FAQ which states the following in the fifth question…

Q5: Do MVPs represent Microsoft?

A5: No. MVPs are not Microsoft employees, nor do they speak on Microsoft’s behalf. MVPs are third-party individuals who have received an award from Microsoft that recognizes their exceptional achievements in technical communities.

Starting on October 15, 2007, I will join the ranks of Microsoft as an employee, thus putting myself in violation of this rule.

Don’t worry about me dear friend. I will cope well with this loss of status. I don’t hold Microsoft to blame.

Well, that’s not true. I do hold them to blame. While in Redmond recently, Scott Guthrie (aka ScottGu) showed me a rough prototype of a cool MVC framework they are working on for a future version of ASP.NET. When I saw it, I told Scott,

I want to work on that. How can I work on that?

So yes, I do blame Microsoft. I blame Microsoft for showing me something to which I absolutely could not resist contributing. I will be starting soon as a Senior Program Manager in the ASP.NET team.

I will continue to work from Los Angeles while we work on selling our house, which unfortunately is bad timing as housing prices have taken a bit of a dive around here. Once we have things settled over here, we’ll pack our things and move up to Seattle.

I’ll be in Seattle the week of October 15 for New Employee Orientation and to meet the rest of the team, so hopefully we can have another geek dinner/drink (I’m looking at youBrad,Scott,Peli, et all).

On the other side of the coin, work has been really fun lately at Koders, especially with the release of Pro Edition and the rails work I’ve been doing lately, so leaving is not easy, despite my short tenure. It’s a great company to work for and I wish them continued success.

My last day is this Wednesday and I will be taking a short break in between jobs to spend time with the family, travel, and get the house ready to sell.

As for Subtext, I will continue to contribute my spare moments leading the charge towards making it a fantastic blogging platform. When you think about it, joining the ASP.NET team is really just a clever ploy to make Subtext even better by being able to influence the underlying platform in a direction that makes it a joy to write code and tests for it. Yeah, I said tests. Of course, my goal would be to make every app built on ASP.NET, not just Subtext, better (and more testable as a contributing factor to being better) due to the work that we do.

Wish me luck in that endeavor.