The first ever blog post

I’ve wanted to start a blog for many years, and finally decided that if I don’t just do it now, I never will.  For the past 3 years, I’ve been planning to set up a server for blogging, and to show off some of the cool technology we’ve been working on over at the ASP.NET / IIS … with visions of poll-driven topics, exclusive interviews, and free MS software (well, maybe not the free software J).  But time went on, and the more ambitious I became the less likely it was that anything was to come of it.

So, I went to godaddy, got a domain name with the “Quick Blog” feature free with domain purchase, set it up in 15 minutes, and posted the first blog post … Wow, that was easy!  If this goes well, then next up will be setting up the latest IIS7 (http://www.iis.net/default.aspx?tabid=7, check it out baby!) server build at home, and dropping Community Server on it.  But for now, this will do – as long as I can ignore the advertisement at the top of the page.

Just a few words about me and this blog.  My name is Mike Volodarsky, I am a Program Manager in the Microsoft’s Internet Information Services team, out in the main campus in Redmond, WA.  I own the design and development of the IIS core server, the ASP.NET runtime, and a number of special projects that you’ll hear about on this blog.  I’ve owned pretty much all of the core runtime features of ASP.NET 2.0 before it shipped last year, and now I am primarily focused on delivering the world’s best (and Microsoft’s best no doubt) web server with IIS7 in Windows Vista / Longhorn.  In this blog, I want to share some of the technology we are working on, get out some product information to help people adopt IIS/ASP.NET, and get your feedback on the work we are doing.

If you have any questions / comments / interest about IIS, ASP.NET, web server infrastructure, security, performance, scalability, feel free to ask and I’ll blog on it.

I guess sometimes, you have to stop planning and just get going (if you want a good reminder for this for your desk at work – check out http://www.despair.com/planning.html).