Matthieu Mezil is a Parisian who really digs .NET and the Entity Framework. He writes a lot about it in his native tongue (that would be French ;-)) in his blog.

Since my French, which I studied for 4 years in high school and college (which was a long, long time ago) is pretty rusty, I use google’s translation to get a gist of what he is saying in his blog.

But now that Matthieu is an MVP, he has started a mirror blog in English on the msmvps.com/blogs site.

So to recap

Matthieu Mezil in French

Matthieu Mezil in English

The snacks at the DevSummit in Stockhom speak loudly of the healthy living of the Swedes.

Here is fruit and some yummy mango banana smoothies!

I remember the year at TechEd just after Steve Ballmer slimmed down and got healthy. The afternoon snacsk of candy bars, chips and hostess cupcakes was replaced with healthier fare – baked potato chips, celery and carrot sticks, stuff like that. From one extreme to another.

The above is MUCH more my speed, though I was also quite happy to find bite sized toblerone bars at one of the vendor booths!

I’m not sure which he is more excited about! Just kidding. But considering that his wife is going to let him go to the MVP summit only 2 weeks after their first child is born, it makes one wonder!

Hey Matthieu – what’s this about making fun of being a VB MVP? 😉

Matthieu has spent a lot of time in the MSDN forums answering questions on Entity Framework. Thanks to him, I’ve had time to write my book while he gives the team a run for their money on answering questions. 🙂

I used to live in NY State’s Hudson Valley and am always interested in what’s going on there with the software community.

Some folks I know are beginning to plan for a summit to bring together software people from around the region.

They have a website with a survey (on the registration page) to help with planning the summit.

Hudson Valley Software Summit

Here is a copy of the overview on the home page:

The goal of the Hudson Valley Software Summit (HVSS) is to encourage technological innovation in the region. The area is richly endowed with creative people, many of them software developers and entrepreneurs.

The HVSS is an opportunity for these folks to network with each other and to showcase their work for others outside the immediate community, such as potentially interested parties in New York City, Northern New Jersey, Albany, and Boston.Those for whom this event is a must attend occasion include:

• Venture capital firms
• Technology firms
• Internet service providers
• Private equity firms
• VC-backed portfolio companies
• Angel investors
• Professional service providers

Who work in the fields of:

• Biotechnology
• Communications
• Computers
• Internet
• Medical
• Peripherals
• Semiconductors
• Semiconductor equipment
• Software

Red-Gate is one of those companies that you just can’t help but love. They produce phonemenally useful and popular developer /data developer tools, and the community facing people are a joy to work with. It doesn’t surprise me that this stems from a company with a good soul. So it’s no surprise (but still quite nice) to read that they have been chosen (for the 2nd year in a row) as one of the “Top 100 Best Small Companies to Work For” in the U.K. by the Sunday Times. Read more on Red-Gates’s website.

Scott Galloway recently joined the ASP.NET team as a P.M. for ASP.NET 3.5. Congratulations!

My conspiracy theory is that Microsoft is actually building a new team for a new product called Scott.NET.

Who’s next? Scott Mitchell? Scott Watermasysk? K.Scott Allen? There are still a LOT of ASP.NET Scotts not yet on the payroll.

Microsoft announced 14 high level promotions yesterday including those of ScottGu and Soma! read more

[A New DevLife post]

Roger collected all of his Visual Studio Magazine covers (that is, those issues where articles written by him were featured on the cover) in one blog post. It’s quite impressive!

When I was at ReMix Boston in early October, I remember that Stan Shultes told me that someone was doing user group presentation on Entity Framework in Florida but couldn’t think of the person’s name at the moment. Shortly afterwards, I had an email conversation with someone who had asked an interesting question on the ADO.NET forums and when he said he lived in Florida, I correctly put two and two together. It was Jonathan Carter who had been doing the presentations.

I met Jonathan a few weeks later at an SDR at Microsoft and, although I’m used to how young many programmers seem to me now (it’s all relative … only because I”m so friggin’ old now ;-)), I was surprised how young he was, but oh so smart. And of course, we had our passion for Entity Framework and Astoria in common!

This didn’t go unnoticed and now Jonathan is wearing a blue badge! He is now the technical evangelist for Visual Studio and .NET Framework – a pretty impressive position to start with.

You can read more about Jonathan’s new job here and then check out the rest of his blog because he’s been blogging up a storm.