Some days it is just so hard to find the time to get important things done, like this blog post. Perhaps in the coming weeks I will recap how seriously my team (the Technical Audience Evangelism Team in the Central US) takes planning at Microsoft. We really put a lot of thought and effort into crafting great programs and plans for our technical audience: architects and developers. Yet the intensity of our planning efforts and the focus and discipline we have put into crafting our plans has put a serious pinch on my time. It has kept me from getting things done, like this blog post. I was supposed to finish it up two weeks ago.

My friend and colleague, Denny Boynton, has been involved in a little something called ARCast.tv v2.0, the evolution of Ron Jacobs' excellent ARCast program on Channel 9. Denny and his peers are picking up the baton from Ron and running the evolution of the program, and the evolution is well underway.

What Happened to Ron?
For those of you who don't know, Ron has moved into a new role here at Microsoft. He announced his new job on his blog back in February. He has relinquished the reins on ARCast and is now a Technical Evangelist in our corporate-based Developer & Platform Evangelism team as a Technical Evangelist.

After doing ARCast.TV for the last couple of years I have decided to hang it up and do something new. Work is underway on the next version of .NET including 2 technologies that I find very interesting. They are Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and Windows Workflow Foundation (WF). My new thing will be to explain these technologies to the world as they appear in .NET v.Next. We won't have much to say about these for the next few months but they will have a coming out party at PDC '08 so I'll see you there.

So, What is ARCast v2.0?
Denny can explain it far better than me, but ARCast v2.0 is an evolution of the program Ron created and ran. As opposed to one core person creating the videos, several evangelists across Microsoft are contributing. They record interviews and discussions with Microsoft guests, industry luminaries, technical experts, and various other "big name guests". They host an interview-style format discussion where the guests share their thoughts, ruminations, and hot sports opinions on all things architecture.

Software architect, to be exact. They have covered a host of interesting topics, from what architecture means at Microsoft to architecting solutions based on specific technologies or products. What topics, you ask? Ah, read on! There's not much more, I promise.

ARCast v2.0 Episode Guide
Here is a short list of their initial episodes:

• ARCast.TV — Simon Guest on Architecture at Microsoft
• ARCast.TV — Juval Lowy on Interface Based Design
• ARCast.TV — Biff Gaut discusses the Microsoft Certified Architect Program
• ARCast.TV — Sundar Swaminathan on MOSS for Public Facing Web Sites
• ARCast.TV — Essential WCF

And they have produced a couple of episodes in addition to these. So head on over to ARCast.tv and check out the fine work of Denny and his peers.

Oh, and Denny, in case you are reading this... I apologize for getting this out two weeks later than I promised. Hopefully you are just impressed enough with a manager who figured out how to use Live Writer and edit his dasBlog templates. (With Larry Clarkin's help, of course.)