Ch-ch-ch-changes

[Dave, forgive me for lifting your headline it’s just too good a fit for the occasion]

As anticipated during a recent CloudCover episode, tomorrow it’s going to be my first day as Principal Program Manager in the identity product team. I’ll be looking after the developer experience for our identity products on premises and in the cloud. My office is being moved from Building 24 to the Redwest campus, I won’t have a place to put stuff down until Tuesday, and yet I am excited as a kid the day before school.

Claims based identity has been my passion for the last few years, or at least the one passion I have I could talk about in public: and talked about it I have, at literally hundreds of events big and small, in form of samples, hands-on labs, whitepapers, articles, videos, books; to customers, partners, students, colleagues, journalists and anybody who would care (or pretend) to listen. In the years in which I have been the identity evangelist, claims-based identity has gone from arcane code samples that few brave would would dare picking up to a fully mainstream technology, recognized by everybody and used by many, with the shift to the cloud providing even further acceleration. I am not taking any credit for it, mind you just stating some facts.

The point is that I believe we are now at the stage in which the claims-based identity meme is self-sustaining, we’ve been there for some time already. There is still the need to evangelize it, but in my opinion that is largely due to the fact that claims-based identity has not sank deep enough yet in the iso-osi stack or in our dev tools to be simply used without conscious effort. Joining the engineering team is my best chance to contribute to that transition. The identity team overflows with incredibly talented people, many of whom I already had the pleasure to work with through the years: joining them is an honor and a privilege I’ll work hard to deserve.

As much as I’m excited to jump on this new adventure, I cannot help but feel a sting of sadness in leading the Evangelism group. Through the 6 years I’ve been working there, I’ve received nothing but trust in me and my ideas, and empowerment to put them in practice. I have learned a ton and grew really a lot: who would have thought that I went from being incomprehensible to nearly everyone to get #2 spot among the PDC10 speakers, #6 at TechEd EU 10, deliver keynotes in fronts of thousands, and many other great personal satisfactions I would have never thought within my reach? If you would have told me back in 2005, when I moved to the US, I would have told you you are nuts  
I am convinced this is largely thanks to my immediate team: I’ve been lucky to share meeting room and backstages with a long series of peers and leaders, many of whom I now call friends. Thank you guys, I have learned so much from all of you!

What does this change mean to you, my loyal reader? At least at first, not much. I was focused on identity, developers and the cloud, and that’s what I will be keep focusing on. I’ll keep showing up at events, albeit considerably less often (goodbye, Diamond status with Delta!). 
There is a pipeline of deliverables I contributed to, which will progressively surface during the next few weeks as part of the output of the Windows Azure Evangelism Team: I’ll blog about it, as usual.
After that, you’ll likely no longer see posts on big samples (a’ la FabrikamShipping or Umbraco integration). Most of my energies will go directly in the product (tools, SDK samples, etc), hence that’s what I’ll talk about (when the time is right, of course). I will also come back to some of the more abstract posts I was used to write few years back, and I will ask much more often for your input!

In fact, I want to start RIGHT NOW. Here there’s a short survey on WIF and ACS, which I’ve been circulating with some MVPs and would like to open to everyone now. This is your chance to let us know what we need to improve: take advantage of it, while my enthusiasm for new challenges is at its peak!