Win One of Two Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate with MSDN Subscriptions!

Update 8/9/2010: Contest is closed and winners picked - thanks to all of those that submitted!

To celebrate my venture into the brave new world of independent consultancy I’ve decided to give away two MSDN Subscriptions – specifically, the top of the line Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate with MSDN subscriptions valued at $11,899 each!*

In the spirit of full disclosure, Microsoft gave me these subscriptions (plus one more which I’ll give away at SharePoint Saturday Denver on August 7th, 2010 so make sure your register!) for participating in the Visual Studio beta program with the intent that I would give these away at my discretion – well what better way to give them away than to offer them up to readers of my blog and specifically those who have used my tools.

So here’s how I’m going to offer them up – if you are interested simply post a comment with one of two things: either your favorite stsadm command, PowerShell cmdlet, code sample or other download that you use from my blog, or a brief story/description/explanation of how the use of my extensions (or code samples or other downloads) saved your company time (and therefore money) – essentially what I’m looking for is testimonials so I prefer the details over the favorite but I know that not everyone can share their story due to confidentiality issues so what I’ll do is give one subscription away randomly to those that post their favorite command and one subscription to the person with the best story as judged by me. I’ll plan on announcing the winner the first week of August.

Please help me spread the word and good luck to everyone! I can’t wait to see the comments!

P.S. Make sure that when you post your comment you provide some way for me to identify you (if you post anonymously sign it with your name otherwise create a profile).

*The subscriptions are a not-for-resale version with some benefit restrictions such as no technical support benefits or MSDN magazine subscription and all product licenses are for development and test only so it’s not quite the $11k value of the retail subscription but you get all the same licenses so the value is still pretty high.

Big Changes

Astute readers of my blog may have noticed that my blog header and byline have changed just a bit in the past week. For the past year I’ve been working as a Senior Architect at ShareSquared, a small SharePoint consultancy – last week I decided that the time was right for me to take a bit of a risk and leave the comfort of ShareSquared to pursue a goal that I’ve had for over 10 years: I’ve decided to go out on my own as an independent consultant!

I’ve enjoyed my time at ShareSquared and made a lot of friends and got to help build what I hope will be a great product for the company but despite all that I felt that if ever I was going to give this whole independent thing a try now was the time. SharePoint 2010 has already proven to be a very popular product and considerably more complex than 2007 so there’s a lot of people out there looking for help – hopefully now is the right time for me to take advantage of this unique time in the product life cycle.

As part of going solo I’ve formed my own company called “Falchion Consulting, LLC”. I don’t yet have a website up but it will eventually be at http://www.falchionconsulting.com (for now it just redirects to this blog). I currently already have some work lined up for the short term but I am looking for that next opportunity so if you’re interested in talking to me about how I can help you with your SharePoint 2007 or SharePoint 2010 deployment or custom development please don’t hesitate to email me at gary@falchionconsulting.com.

This is certainly a big step for me and there’s a part of me that is scared to death but I’ve got a great support network of friends and my wife and daughter are being extremely supportive so at this point I’m very optimistic that everything will fall into place – wish me luck and please keep me in mind as you look for someone to help with your SharePoint work :)