On February 2nd, Groundhogs Day (3rd favorite holiday :), I started a new job. I am now the Vice President of Product Development at TourFactory, a small company based in Spokane. They provide a web-based service to real-estate agents to help them market the homes they are selling.

The application is built primarily in classic ASP and I've been a bit nostalgic over the years for the simplicity of that platform, but I'm over that now :). I can't wait to begin the process of converting the product to .Net (one of the reasons I was hired). Classic ASP is simple, unfortunately it's a bit too simple. There is not very good support for debugging or Intellisense and there are many language features that I've grown accustomed to in my years as a .Net developer that are missing.

So far the job has been great. The people there are very easy to work with and are excited about some of the changes that I want to make, especially to the deployment cycle (more on this in another post).

This is my first management position, but I only have to manage 3 other developers, so hopefully I will be able to handle it. I've had the opportunity to work for a couple of great managers that I really respect over the years, so hopefully I have picked up a few good habits from them.

For those that know me, I still live in Arlington Washington, a town over 300 miles away and on the other side of the Cascade mountains from Spokane. I work every other week in Spokane and am in the process of getting an apartment there.

Spokane is a neat city to work in. You can get through most of downtown without going outside through a series of pedestrian walkways that go through many of the buildings. This is nice because it can get pretty cold in winter and awfully warm in summer. There is also a nice park within a couple blocks of the office that includes rides, trails, trees, a river, and more. There are also a bunch of restaurants in the area that look pretty good, though I've only had the opportunity to go to one so far.

The building I work in is the Fernwell Building. It was build in 1891, almost 120 years old! Thankfully the building does have electricity, air conditioning, and fiber optics. It is a nice building and has been well maintained. My office is on the 3rd floor, far left corner (see picture below).

If you haven't heard yet, IE 8 was released today (March 19th) at 9am (PDT). IE 8 is supposed to be faster and more standards compliant than its predecessor. However, there doesn't seem to be any big, noticeable improvements to the browser like there were in IE7 (like tabbed browsing) so it will be interesting to see what the adoption rate for IE 8 will be.

Download Internet Explorer 8

If you like following the browser wars, Firefox 3.5 (codenamed Shiretoko¹) seems to be just around the corner. This is a major update to the current version of Firefox (3.0).

1. Shiretoko: according to Wikipedia, this is an Ainu word meaning "end of the earth".

Over the last few months I've had a bunch of problems with my web host (UltimaHosts.Net) so I decided to drop them in favor of free web hosting at my new work (more on this in a future post).

I didn't want to mess with installing Community Server (a bit overkill for what I do), so I figured I would try a new blog engine as well. My new blog engine is BlogEngine.Net. It seems to be a decent, light-weight blog engine with enough features to keep me happy, but without all the extra features that I didn't use and that just made it difficult to manage. I'm sure I'll be changing things around in the next few weeks such as figuring out how to get my color scheme, fav icon, logos, etc.