The downside is that I have spent all of my time the last 6 years building stuff for companies like Microsoft and Dell, neglecting the content in my blog because I wanted to run my blog on a .NET platform.  I am a huge advocate for dog fooding (especially on .NET)  so I tried a few immature platforms for blog – Umbraco and FunnelWeb.

Umbraco is a CMS at heart.  I really love the attitude that the Umbraco guys have.  While at Neudesic and working for Microsoft, I was the architect for the latest version of www.asp.net and it was a very effective tool to get off the legacy platform.  It has its challenges, but if you embrace xslt and jQuery tmpl then you can do a lot with it. The latest 4.x versions have gotten drastically better due to new core dev additions.  Version 5 is a ground up rethinking and I have no doubt it will be awesome.  That said, it is not a good place for a blog.

FunnelWeb seems like more of a pet project for MVC early adopters.  It is very basic and you have to host it yourself and Microsoft hosting is always more expensive..  I was lucky enough to get hooked up by DiscountASP.net so it did not cost me to host, but the features were not really that awesome.

So here I am on wordpress. I know I should have been here from the start (it is the best of the best), but the engineer in me figured I could build my own or push another and try to fill a .NET gap.  So what changed my mind?

• I am starting a new job at HP building enterprise applications on open source
• I realize that I have lost a few really great blog posts over the last 2 years that I am not anxious to re-write
• I am spending more time tinkering when I really need to be writing

My new job is primarily presentation architect.  In the next month, every technology is on the table including any of the Java MVC frameworks, Rails, node.js, or even ASP.NET MVC (doubt it will win for multiple reasons).  I think the only decision that I have made is that jQuery will be the javascript framework.

This has been a bit of a rambling, but that is where my brain is.  So much has changed in my life over the last year – marriage, children, new house, rental houses, remodeling, too much work, not enough play, and so on.  For the next week, I pass the proverbial torch to some smart new folks for .NET sites.  The following week, I am putting 200+ sq ft of wood floors in my house and hanging out by the pool.  Following that, I welcome Java back into my life.

This is an exciting spring!