Many Microsoft bloggers write small entries on their aniversary dates to reflect on their time at Microsoft.  Rather than doing that, I had decided to write one on my 500th day, which seemed like an interesting time to pause and reflect. Quite serendipitously, my 500th day at Microsoft landed on Jan 1st, 2004.  Of course, it's Jan 3rd right now, but I've been up to my elbows in book writing, and took some time off yesterday to enjoy the large volumes of snow the Puget Sound area has been enjoying this last week -- and promptly managed to injure my back on the slopes, so now I have plenty of time to reflect while a heating pad nurses my back .

Many of you know I'm an evangelist at Microsoft, but what most of you don't know right now is that I don't evangelize at the moment.  Instead, I'm the “bad news messenger” making sure customers and developers understand our overall situation with regards to the Microsoft Java Virtual Machine and how you can transition away from it.  Many people, in fact, are stunned to find that I'll even gladly talk to them about migrating their Java applications to Sun's JVM.  Why do I do that?  Because from the highest executive level down to me, we know need to do the right thing for the customer, and sometimes the right answer is helping the customer move to another JVM (there's limits on how much we can help because our support people aren't experts in Sun's current version of Java, nor can we fix things inside their JVM, but we will do the best we can to help).  Of course, we'd love to see people move to .NET, and we will continue to work hard to make sure that we offer the best  tools to help you migrate your applications to it.

I am looking forward to returning to evangelism in the true sense of the word this year.  Vic Gundotra, one of the GM's in my organization, points out that evangelists have six key responsibilities:

• They help developers understand the value proposition of our tools and platform
• They network with ISVs and key customers
• They create communities that are excited about our technologies
• They build prototypes to help partners and developers cut through the marketing hype and understand the true value of our approach (yes, that means Microsoft evangelists work hard to “pull back the curtains“ on the stuff that Microsoft marketing people sometimes try to cover ). 
• They listen to the needs of customers and developers to understand the correct evangelism strategy, and build a plan around it (rather than having each evangelist “go cowboy“, so to speak)
• And most importantly: Have fun. 

Personally, I don't think we've done a good job of creating an organized Java strategy.  Many Java developers don't know, for instance, that we have a comprehensive pattern repository, refactoring coming in our next version of Visual Studio, or detailed articles on how to migrate  technologies  from  Java  to  .NET, or that we have a complete guide on interoperability with J2EE and .NET.

So, my “new year's resolution” is to fix this.  I promise every Java developer that wants to migrate to .NET (or is being forced to) that I will do everything I can to help make the road easier in 2004.  As one who was a hard-core Microsoft-hating J2EE developer over 2 years ago, I remember the frustration I had trying to learn .NET, and it was because I was trying VERY hard to shoehorn my Java thinking into .NET (with little success).  That frustration is still fresh in my mind (although my J2EE knowledge is now getting more and more rusty).  I will list the steps I intend to take next week here, but I would love to hear suggestions from any of you on how we can make the road smoother for Java developers (besides the old, “Why don't you just adopt J2EE and be done with it?” question )

Thanks for reading my ramblings!