It sounds like a summer tradition perhaps – many of the summer interns were invited to a dinner at the Gates family home. Jeff Maurone wrote 2 blog posts about this very unique experience. Fun read. Lots of adjectives. First, Second

What I liked the most about it was Jeff’s great appreciatation for what I also enjoy so much about meeting my fellow geeks – getting to see a little of the personal/human side of Bill Gates when his daughter came down to hang out and sat holding his hand chatting with her dad for a bit.

this isn’t an announcement (cause you all know by now) but just public congrats to my buds and yours, Andrew Duthie who is Microsoft’s newest Developer Evengelist (though I think they changed the titles again at MGB) and Scott Watermasysk who is now working with Rob Howard and Jason Alexander at Telligent Systems. The best part for both of them is neither one had to move!

If you haven’t heard Carl (or combined with his brother Jay) Franklin play the guitar and sing, you may be surprised at what a serious talent he is. I have never heard them together before, but thanks to a quick email from Carl, am listening right now on a live stream from www.whuh.org.

Don Kiely has been here since Friday night.  He spoke at VTdotNET last night. I’m too tired to blog about all the fun we’ve been having and how fantastic the meeting was last night, but I promise I will soon.

Watch this space for some news from G. Andrew Duthie … he’s hinting that he’s gonna spill the beans on Monday. grin grin grin (nah – he’s not moving to Vermont…but it’s still good)

HAPPY BIRTHDAY MARCIE!

http://weblogs.asp.net/datagridgirl

James Robertson is a Smalltalk developer and prolific blogger. And he reads my blog. Often, when I write about a problem I have with .NET, he uses it as proof of why .NET is a terrible development platform. Here’s an example. I don’t mind, really. It’s kind of funny. And we have a little bit of a virtual relationship because of it, which I enjoy. (Especially if I post some bubbly anti-Bush comments.) My usual mantra with programming is “heck, if *I* can do it, so can you!“. So when I can’t do something, James says “if *Julie* can’t do it, then that proves that .NET sucks!“ He’s surely reading this even and hopefully smiling (or even grinning like the Cheshire Cat!) I just wanted to make note of it.

www.armysteve.com

I put a little yellow ribbon over on the right of my blog with a link to his site.

I followed a link from John Bristowe to the Microsoft Communities site.

On there I saw a link for MVP Awards. It has all of the MVPs listed, with pics and bios and other information. We have a place where we can fill out all of this information. I had not yet seen it publicly displayed. Cool.

Then I followed a link for User Groups. There is a whole pile of informaiton on how to start a user group , how to find speakers, how to promote it. This is information that we also try to get out via INETA, so maybe we can find something in there to leverage in the User Group Relations Committee. Cool.

There is a TON more on the community pages. Definitely go cruise around!

A perfect example of how evangelism (of microsoft products, in this case, works).

Eric is the user group leader for Chatanooga Area .NET User Group and a member of the IENTA User Group Relations steering committee.