As many of you may know from experience, Steve is a great presenter and an incredible source of knowledge on ASP.NET.

So now that he is learning things like this:

The training today was on mines, including how to detect them, how they’re employed, and how to react if you find yourself in a minefield.  The instruction was good, and next week we are scheduled to hook back up with the same EOBC class to go through some boobytrap classes, which will be the remainder of our training here.  Unfortunately, two things I was hoping to get in, demolition training and US weapons (heavy stuff) training probably isn’t going to happen at this point.

I look forward to the analogies he may pepper his presentations with. If you have ever sat in on one of Patrick Hynds talks on security, you will understand! Patrick’s military background shines through when he is talking about internet/network security – because as we all know, it’s a war!

I have to point out a funny trend here. Brian Johnson, who is the content strategist of the MSDN Developer Security Center also has a military background. Hmmm… maybe Steve, too, will be drawn more to security when he gets back!!

If you answered “yes“, you are not alone. When I made the leap from FoxPro to VB5 (well really VB4, about one month before 5 came out), I did not change my programming style very much with my first application. Kind of like coding in .NET as though it is VB6. Then I discovered Deborah’s columns in VB Magazine and her books and realized I was barely using Visual Basic. I read her book “Doing Objects in VB5“ and took a hands on class with her (just as VB6 was released) and it completely changed my outlook on software development and architecting applications rather than just building big piles of rubber bands and band-aids. I have talked to many developers who have said similar things about Deborah’s books and articles and presentations. Even today, I found a comment by someone who admits to having been a former Deborah Kurata groupie. If you know this guy at all, I think you may be in for a little surprise!

Deborah is finishing up a new book. I have seen a few of the chapters and this will definitely be another gem!

Those 6 little words were “I have a blog now, too” from Cathi Gero.

So let me review. In less than 3 months some of the top women developers in our industry have started weblogs.

Prior to this recent rush, Susan Warren started a blog in November (right after PDC.)

Then spring comes with a flood of new blogs:

First Kate Gregory gets a blog.

Then Kathleen Dollard buckles and blogs.

Then Michele Leroux Bustamente starts up dasBlonde.

Earlier this week Kimberly Tripp amazed us with her new SQL blog.

And now Cathi Gero is blogging too.

For those of you who do not know Cathi, she is a serious pro with a lot of experience. Here is her bio, ripped from the DevTeach speaker page.

Cathi Gero, C.P.A., is founder and development director of Prenia Corporation, providing custom software applications, training, and architectural designing to businesses and developers. Cathi is a Microsoft C# MVP and is an active member of the .NET community. She has extensive experience developing applications using the .NET Framework, Visual FoxPro, SQL Server, and Crystal Reports as well as other technologies. She is a speaker at national conferences, author of white papers for Microsoft, and technical editor for the book ‘.NET For VFP Developers’. She also has a monthly column, “Cathi Gero’s .NET Tips” which appears in Universal Thread Magazine. Most of the year Cathi travels to various companies providing onsite training, mentoring, and development experience.

<me>grinning from ear to ear</me>

Hmmm, who’re we gonna work on next…?

So, I’m a little late to the party.

I was going thruogh the rest of my pile of mail from while I was at TechEd. I was afraid there might be some bills in there to pay!

There was the June 2004 issue of asp.netPro magazine with the Reader Awards (it took me 10 minutes to find the link to this article – that site has been in need of a major overhaul since it’s inception! and no links to the winner’s either!)

How fun to read through and see:

Scott Cate’s  and Dave Wanta’s kbAlertz get Best Community and Product of the Year

Scott Cate’s  myKB as Best Content Managment System.

Peter Blum’s Peter’s Polling Package as Best Polling Tool and his Date Package as the Best Scheduling/Calendar Tool.

Dave Wanta’s ASPNet Email as Best EMail Control

Andrew Putnam’s dotNetBB as Best Forum App

Mark Miller (and all the folks at Developer Express) ‘s CodeRush as best Add-In and numerous other products from them as well

I loved seeing these! There are other categories and other winners, but I know these guys (though I only met Mark just last week at TechEd and haven’t talked much with Andrew since our emails when dotNetBB was really taking off a few years ago). But Scott and Peter and Dave – cool, cool and cool. Congrats! 

Clemens scooped it!

Kimberly Tripp’s blog went live today and it already has a bunch of great content! It looks like she has finally buckled under the pressure! Her first post – “I can’t not blog anymore“ – says it all.

Kate Gregory has two fantastic posts about knowing what you want and getting it. Kate has a lot of incredibly valuable experience not only as a programmer, but as a consultant and a business person. I have been fortunate enough to have Kate be somewhat of a mentor to me and have learned some of these gems from her in the past. At the Women In I.T. luncheon at TechEd, many more people were able to benefit from Kate’s insights as well as those of the other incredible panelists.

Kate is now sharing some of these thoughts in her weblog.

What you want to get could be what I need to give

Know what you want from the Meeting

Back in November, Leon Bambrick posted his now famous VB Refactoring Menu on his little Brinkster hosted weblog. The links to this post were so many that Brinkster shut him down. As soon as the site came back up, I copied and pasted the image to my own blog (with all credit to Leon of course). He finally moved to his own domain a month or so ago.

Don Box just discovered the menu on the Brinkster site and pointed to it. Then Chris Sells saw Don’s post and did it again.

Eeek! This for SURE will do Leon’s site in again. If you haven’t seen it, do him a favor and follow this link instead. And definitely subscribe to this guy’s blog!

That didn’t take long! 🙂  Rob Howard is now an MSDN Regional Director. Congrats.

Rory – THIS is totally cool!!!

You need to be a NYTimes online subscriber (free) to get at this article which came out today in the Technology section.

It just figures! He’s a star — get used to it! He spent 15 minutes writing a tool and came in 3rd place!

Here’s the article on the announcement from PCMag this morning. (thanks to TabletPCTalk for pointing that out.)

Peter Rysavy has a nice write up on the 3 winning powertoys.

There is still the full blown app contest going on – $100,000 prize! Deadline is July 31st. I had a long talk with the person who is in charge of this contest when I was at Redmond and will post about that…