Now that my book about Dependency Injection is out, it’s only fitting that I also invert my own dependencies by striking out as an independent consultant/advisor. In the future I’m hoping to combine my writing and speaking efforts, as well as my open source interests, with helping out clients write better code.

If you’d like to get help with Dependency Injection or Test-Driven Development, SOLID, API design, application architecture or one of the other topics I regularly cover here on my blog, I’m available as a consultant worldwide.

When it comes to Windows Azure, I’ll be renewing my alliance with my penultimate employer Commentor, so you can also hire me as part of larger deal with Commentor.

In case you are wondering what happened to my employment with AppHarbor, I resigned from my position there because I couldn’t make it work with all the other things I also would like to do. I still think AppHarbor is a very interesting project, and I wish my former employers the best of luck with their endeavor.

This has been a message from the blog’s sponsor (myself). Soon, regular content will resume.

I’m pleased to announce that I’ll be joining AppHarbor as a developer. With my long-standing interest in TDD and OOD as well as my more recent interests in open-source .NET software, distributed source control systems, Continuous Delivery etc. AppHarbor seems like a perfect match for me.

Although AppHarbor is very attractive to me, this has been a difficult decision as Commentor has been a great employer. However, despite great customers I just don’t feel like consulting at the moment. Since Safewhere went out of business I’ve been writing much less code than I’d liked, so when presented with an opportunity to join such a congenial outfit as AppHarbor I had few doubts.

I’ll still be working out of Copenhagen, Denmark, and I also expect to keep up my usual community engagement at home as well as abroad.

A week ago I concluded Microsoft Denmark’s 2010 .NET Community Christmas Calendar with a challenge about resolving closed types with MEF. As 2011 came around, the deadline ended, so it’s now time to pick the winner.

I didn’t get a lot of entries, which can be interpreted in at least one (or more) of the following ways:

• The challenge was too difficult
• The challenge wasn’t interesting
• The prize wasn’t attractive
• People had other things to do during the holidays

Whatever the reason, it made my task of picking a winner that much easier. The best Danish entry came from Daniel Volder Guarnieri who cheated a bit by partially hard-coding the composition of Mayonnaise into the ContainerBuilder. As I wrote in the original challenge, there are many ways to tackle the challenge, and one was to take the unit tests very literally :)

However, honorable mention must go to Boyan Mihaylov who participated just for the honor. He took a more general approach similar to Fluent MEF. This involves implementing a completely new ComposablePartCatalog with associated ComposablePartDefinition and ComposablePart implementations – not a trivial undertaking.

Kudos to Boyan and congratulations to Daniel. My thanks for your submissions, and a happy new year to all my readers!

As some of my readers may already know, my (previous) employer Safewhere went out of business in August, so I started looking for something new to do. I believe that I have now found it.

October 1st I’ll start in my new role as Technical Lead at Commentor, where it will be my responsibility to establish us as the leading Windows Azure center of expertise in Denmark (and beyond?). That’s quite a big mouthful for me, but also something that I’m very excited about.

This means that besides working on real Windows Azure projects with Danish customers, I also anticipate doing a lot of blogging, speaking and writing about Azure in the future.

What does this mean for my many other endeavors, like my book, AutoFixture or just blogging and speaking about TDD and DI in general? These things are something that I’ve always been doing mainly in my spare time, and I intend to keep doing that. Perhaps there are even better opportunities for synergy in my new line of work, but only time will tell.

I’m really thrilled to be given the opportunity to expand in a slightly different direction. It’ll be hard, but I’m sure it’s also going to be a blast!

In the next couple of weeks I will be giving a couple of talks in Copenhagen.

At Community Day 2010 I will be giving two talks on respectively Dependency Injection and TDD.

In early June I will be giving a repeat of my previous CNUG TDD talk.

As part of the Copenhagen .NET User Group (CNUG) winter and early autumn schedule, I’ll be giving a talk on (slightly advanced) TDD.

The talk will be in Danish and takes place April 15th, 2010. More details and sign-up here.

I'll be doing a TechTalk on the Managed Extensibility Framework and Dependency Injection at Microsoft Denmark January 20th 2010.

The talk will be in Danish. Details and sign-up here.

Daniel Frost has published a podcast where he discusses Dependency Injection with me. It's about half an hour long and in Danish. Hear it here.

Daniel Frost has published a podcast where he discusses WCF with me. It's about half an hour and in Danish. Hear it here.

Lately, several people have implied to me that I should consider start using Twitter, so here I am, with only a vague idea about what to do with it…

At May 12 2009 I'll be speaking at 7N's IT Konference 2009 (in Danish, so that's no spelling error). You can read the program here.

The topic of my talk will be TDD patterns and terminology, so I'll discuss Fixtures, Stubs, Mocks and the like. As always, xUnit Test Patterns will form the basis of my vocabulary.

Of the other speakers, I'm particularly looking forward to hear my good friend Martin Gildenpfennig from Ative speak!

Today I spent my first working day at Safewhere, where I’ll be working as a Senior Software Engineer. In the last couple of years, Safewhere and I have crossed paths a couple of times, and each time they always left me with the impression of a very professional and congenial ISV, so I’m super-excited to be joining!

Expect the occasional Geneva or Federation-related blog post to intermingle with the usual TDD stuff in the future :)

As readers of my old MSDN blog will know, ploeh blog is moving to this new site.

Responding to the current financial crisis, Microsoft is cutting costs and laying off 1400 employees. During that process, the entire Microsoft Dynamics Mobile Team is being disbanded, which is very sad, since it was a very nice place to work. The team spirit was great, and we were really committed to agile development methodologies, but all good things must end...

Currently, I can't even begin to guess what the future looks like for me, although to regular readers of my blog I can state that I sincerely intend to keep writing as I always have. If you subscribed to my old blog, then please subscribe here instead. The blog is moving because the old blog belongs to Microsoft, and only employees can post, so I'll soon be writing my last post on the old blog.

Until now, it's always been Microsoft's policy to retain the old blogs, even when the original authors leave the company, so while I will not be able to post to the old blog, I expect the old posts to be around for a long time yet.

Professionally, I don't know what I will do now. If I can find new employment in these times, I may simply decide to take on new challenges with a new employer. However, I'm also considering free-lancing for a while: Coding, mentoring, lecturing, writing...

If you are in the position where you think you can use my services, whether for full-time employment or just a few days, please let me know. Keep in mind that I'm based in Copenhagen, Denmark, and while I can certainly travel after work, I cannot permanently move due to family obligations.