In December of 2006, I blew up my blog.

It was Christmas break and I had decided to update the code base of my blog. It was a small update, but something I could just throw up there on the way out the door. It didn’t work. In fact nothing was working. I could no longer run the application on my local machine. Somewhere I had lost something and had mismatched my assemblies. I had half-assed my blog code as much as I had half-assed my blog. This resulted in frustration and a hand-illustrated "Boom".

In 2006, I hadn’t done much on my blog at all. Sure I was busy at work, which I do put a lot of energy into and enjoy, but I knew it was just sitting there languishing. It had become an events blog, “Something happened here, something happened over here, too. I have thoughts to share, but no inclination to write them down.”

Blogs can be useful in different ways and mine has not been useful since post PDC 2003 days when I was blazing a trail through Avalon (now named WPF). I learned Avalon by digging in, trying to create and then sharing and garnering feedback. I liked that and I want to do something like that again. I want to learn and share again and interact.

So I’ve laid out some goals for my site.

Site news and feature updates — We do move quickly at work and often update our sites. By logging our progress here I can provide news for those who are interested (friends and community members who are often developers), keep track for my personal recollection and hopefully share useful information for other developers.

Create a gallery of personal work — As a designer type person, I have a large amount of side projects I have started, if only in my head. My belief is that if I have a platform to share these and receive feedback, I will be more apt to complete these projects and get some of that creative energy out in the process.

Explore the role of the Devigner — Finally the “devigner” term comes up. If you have not guessed by “devinger” is a combination of the words “designer” and “developer”. And I believe it is a term that describes what I do. I started my life out more on the designer side, drawing everywhere, loitering in art rooms and painting. Not until later in my life (much later than most geeks) did I get into technology and bending it to my will. Nowadays, I really enjoy and study User Interface design, but I also really enjoy coding and application development.

I believe I showed up at Microsoft (2005) at a very good time. Having been a heavy user of C# and ASP.Net, I was pleased to learn the direction Microsoft was going in the design and Web direction. ASP.Net 2.0, with its improved standards awareness and awesome new advancements (can someone say VirtualPathProvider?), WPF, with its vector and extensible sweetness, Atlas (now ASP.NET Ajax), with it simplifying Ajax for ASP.NET and better web experiences, "WPF/E", with its cross-browser rich Web experience promise, and then there is the whole Expression suite of products which enables building on all this technology.

The technology behind the web is growing quickly, and I want to follow along and explore what this means for people like me. People who design and develop. People who from this day forward will be known “Devigners”.

(All right, so I agree, the end may have been a bit dramatic, but I think it gets the point across…and I do know the term “devigner” has been used before, but I'm going to run with it...)