Peter Provost just announced that he, too, will be speaking at Win-Dev. It will be fun to have Peter in my neck of the woods – though I don’t currently have plans to go to Win-Dev. I’m feeling saturated with conferences already this year and still have speaking gigs DevTeach and DevConnections to look forward to. I’ve gotten to spend a bunch of time with him during my last two trips (MVP Summit and TechEd). Check out the speaker page for this conference – damned impressive!

Leon, this is a beautiful thing…thanks

If you haven’t been following the sorely missed at TechEd, Steve Smith’s new website, ArmySteve.com, it looks like my determinatino that Steve is going to get stuck in a cornfield in Missouri for the next year is not strong enough to affect his karma. He says that it sounds pretty certain that he will be going to Iraq. If you are interested in how the army works, check out his blog. If you are a friend of Steve, this is the place to keep track of him.

Dave Noderer, who does SO SO SO much for INETA as a board member and a very active member of the user group relations strategic committee was recognized by INETA as the Volunteer of the Year at our Sunday meeting. I can’t begin to tell you how well-deserved this was.

Thanks for everything Dave.

Eric Sink has another wonderful addition to his ongoing MSDN column “The Business of Software”. This one is about being a vendor at a trade show – “My Tech Ed Diary“. The SourceGear booth was right by spot where the INETA booth, the Microsoft Tablet PC and the various Developer Tools booths were on the edge of the Microsoft area, so I saw him frequently and got to chat and visit with him a number of times.

Additionally, Eric has a post on his blog addressing a question that is in the forefront of many of our minds: how does the new source control part of the VS2005 Team development tool compare to and affect the future of SourceGear Vault? SourceGear has had a huge advantage in having a great product to compete with Microsoft’s own greatly flawed source control tool – Visual Source Safe. Eric addresses many questions head on and says that probably the biggest problem he will see from this new product is that reduces his chances of becoming a billionaire by age 40. (That was followed, of course, by a big grin…)

Rob’s last day with Microsoft was yesterday. He finally blogged about it. Earlier this week he said that he had actually been hoping the secret would get leaked and was impressed at how seriously people take a request to keep things mum.

Rob will certainly be as available and visible as ever and having a huge impact on our industry and our community. His first non-Microsoft public gig will be at DevTeach in Montreal June 19 – 22. I’ll be a speaker there as well so am looking forward to spending more time with so many of my pals and meeting lots of new developers.

Watch this space for Rob’s new company, Telligent Systems. THere will be at least one familiar face on board there as well. It should be a good match. Rob lives in Texas, so if you think “texas“ and someone who has recently announced a job change, that should be enough for you to figure out who.

Chris, the boy-next-door kinda brainy guy,  recounts how he magically managed to get to the Amsterdam conference where he was speaking, with all points against him, recently. It is a trip of pure serendipity. Part 1   Part 2 Looks to me like Cathi Gero was his guardian angel on this particular trip.

Sam has hung up (as in put away) his “consultant” sign and signed on the dotted line as a W-2 kinda guy. It had to have taken some awesome company and job to do that, and from the sounds of it Adesso Systems was the one that did it for him. Here is his announcement of his new job – oh the dreamy job title: “Chief .NET Architect” 🙂 – and an introduction to the company as well. If Sam is impressed with this company and the product, this is definitely something to keep an eye on!

Continously interesting reading. I am quite fortunately completely void of any idea how t hings work in the army. www.armysteve.com

Burlington is a small market. We have a lot of developers coming to the user group meetings considering how small we are – anywhere from 20 – 50. But unfortunately, the MSDN events that have been here have not been drawing enough people to justify the expense of them. Totally understood. We try, but it is what it is.

However, I LOVED reading Eric King’s post today. He is a user group leader in a tier-3 market (Chatanooga). He convinced MSDN to come to his area because there is a very strong developer community there. And they drew more people than Nashville’s MSDN event – Nashville is the usual target city for these things. I know Eric worked hard to promote the event. GOod work, dude!