Changes a' comin'

A quick update on some changes happening here at Microsoft.

First, the bad news – I am no longer a part of the Embedded team.

Now, the good news – I am moving to the Sustained Engineering team to handle servicing of XPE.  What this means is that XPE servicing will now be part of the servicing infrastructure for all of Windows.  This includes not only security and other updates, but also future service packs for XPE.  My friend and teammate Jay has done a great job with servicing since he joined the team 18 months ago, but if the team is ever to concentrate solely on Longhorn Embedded, they need to have the resources that were previously dedicated to servicing XPE.  So, we give servicing to the servicing experts (along with some resources, like me) and the Embedded team can work on bigger and better things.

Ramifications?  Well, by bringing XPE into the larger Windows servicing structure, we hope to get security bulletins out quicker.  We’re also hoping to get other non-security updates out in a timelier manner, and without so much internal hoo-haw over testing and verification.  Also, because we’ll be treating Embedded like any other Windows product, we hope to avoid problems like we saw with the .Net update last week.  Plus, the Embedded team can dedicate 100% of their attention on Longhorn Embedded, which is a very good thing.

Now, before you start getting your hopes up and inundating me with questions and comments – this won’t happen tomorrow.  It will take a while.  Embedded has been on its own path with regard to servicing for so long that I expect a lot of churn just trying to integrate into the main servicing processes.  As you can imagine, there is a lot to hand over, and we’re still hammering out the details and getting past the he-said/she-said stage of the relationship.  I won’t make any predictions on when things will happen – most of my predictions have been BS in the past.

So there you have it – change can be a good thing, and I’m hoping this will be a very good thing.

As a bit of an aside, this has been in the works for months – I’ve known about it since before XMas last year.  This past January, the entire Embedded team wasin a big office move.  Since I knew I’d be moving once more when I got into the WinSE team, I only unpacked two of my boxes (books, some HW, and stuff for my desk) – the other boxes have been sitting here, unopened, for two months.  My WinSE office move is tonight, so I’ve been looking forward to getting everything out of the boxes again.  However, I’ve heard a rumour that another office move is planned in the near future, so I may never get my stuff unboxed.  Such is life at Microsoft – when you’re trying to carry 1000 canaries in a truck that can only carry 500, the trick is to keep 500 flying at all times…

One last thing – I added a new link to the Mobile and Embedded Device Convention (MEDC, or what used to be just Embedded Devcon) on the upper left.  I plan to be there in Las Vegas in May with my wife, and my money plans to stay.  Hope you can make it – it should be a fun time.