It’s not every day you write this sort of blog post. And you hope it’s not something you do so often that you ever get good at it. I’m certainly sucking up a storm here.

Just last month I hit my four year mark at Microsoft. I reflected on the sheer joy I experienced working with such smart people on cool projects. I’ve been very lucky and fortunate to be able to speak about these projects at many conferences, meeting so many interesting attendees. It’s been a real blast.

Today, I write a different sort of post. It was a tough decision to make, but I’ve decided to leave Microsoft to try something different. This is my last week as a Microsoft employee. On Monday, December 5, 2011 I’ll come into the office, hand over my card key, the launch codes, and the Amex card, and then experience a Microsoft exit interview. It will be interesting.

But before I continue, there’s two things I want to make crystal clear:

  1. I will still be involved with the .NET community and development.
  2. I will still work on NuGet.
  3. I’m known for off-by-one errors and lame jokes.

What’s Next?

I’ll let you know on December 7, when I start a new gig. My new company often announces new employees and I didn’t want to spoil the surprise! I’m very excited about it as it’s a position that will keep me involved in .NET and working on NuGet, but will also let me stretch into multiple other technologies beyond .NET.

I’m not leaving .NET

The way I see it, the .NET community isn’t a place you just leave. A community is a set of relationships among people who hold some common goals or ideals. The people I think are interesting today, will still be interesting on December 7. Well, most of you at least.

Rather, I like to think that I will focus more on being a member of a larger software community, as I wrote about recently. It’s one thing to write about it, but I hope to better live it in the future.

So while I’m not leaving .NET, I am also arriving at Macs, Ruby, and Node.js and whatever other technologies I need to get the job done. I look forward to getting my hands dirty building things with these other technologies in addition to .NET.

What About NuGet?

As I mentioned earlier, I’ll continue to work on the NuGet open source project as a core contributor. From the Outercurve Foundation’s side of things, I’ll also remain on this page as a project lead, though most of the day to day responsibilities will transfer to a Program Manager on the Microsoft side of things. We have yet to figure out in detail how we’ll share responsibilities.

This is possible because there’s an interesting distinction between the NuGet open source project and the NuGet based product that Microsoft ships. I should write about this another time. For the time being, just know I’ll continue to be heavily involved in NuGet once I ramp up in my new job.

What about ASP.NET MVC?

ASP.NET MVC has been a joy to work on. It’s pioneered so much change at Microsoft. Leaving it will be hard, especially with all the cool stuff coming down the pike I wish I could tell you about. Suffice to say, ASP.NET MVC is a mature product in good hands with a strong team in place. I’m not worried about it at all.

In fact, there’s a lot of good stuff coming from the overall team that’s been the result of a long succession of baby steps. I can’t talk about it yet, but I can say that knowing this made my decision especially difficult to make.

Anything Else?

I will still be speaking at CodeMania in New Zealand in March 2012. I made sure to contact the organizers in case they wanted to change their minds given my news but they’re happy to have me speak.

I’m still happy to speak about NuGet, ASP.NET MVC, or anything else for that matter if you have a conference you think I’d be a good fit for.

I will miss working at Microsoft and being involved with the community in that capacity. But I am also excited about this new opportunity to work with the community in a different capacity.

Next week, I’ll tell you about what could possibly draw me away from Microsoft. I hope you’ll stick around.