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http://radio.weblogs.com/0126569/2004/02/10.html#a141

Here’s a little welcome to blogland, Robert! (from the Code Magazine party at PDC)

Learn more about Robert on the 12/16/2003 edition of .Net Rocks

Sorry to see Burlington, VT isn’t on the upcoming tour.

Pink for Marcie who is going to work for Code Project.

I told her “blog your new job and then I can blog it, too” and then my computer sent me dark for hours and hours. So better late than never.

Hooray Marcie. These Robillards are one productive pair!

Look for more [professional] splashes from Toronto from these two coming up.

Hey look at that. Guy Barrette who runs the .net user group in Montreal just emailed to let me know that he has become an RD. This is great news. Montreal has been without an RD for a while. Guy and I do a lot of user group stuff together since we are only 2 hours apart so we try to share resources. He also helps out on the user group relations committee  that I chair for INETA. He works with the user groups in Quebec. 

Guy and I got together to bring Steven Smith from ASPAlliance on a little cross-border tour. He will be here in Vermont in a few weeks to play a little and speak at VErmont.NET and then drive up to Montreal to speak at Guy’s user group. His Montreal gig is an INETA sponsored event. His trip to Vermont is a “Julie bribed me…“ production.

More on that though later…

I love reading Rick’s blog. He’s a really smart and innovative guy who has been working with .net for a long time. He is writing applications and also experimenting and his weblog talks about some of the hurdles he runs into while trying to write software and how he gets around them. Very practical, very engaging and educational. Rick lives in Hawaii. I’m always waiting for some surfing pictures! I have fun emailing him once in a while to tell him the temperature – like when it’s 20 below (F). It’s pretty funny going to a conference and hanging out with Rick from Hawaii and Don Kiely from Alaska.

Farhan – way to GO! Farhan is one of the INETA board members, an author, etc. See more here!

Hip hip hooray. This is my friend who gives me CRAP when I write about him in my blog if for example, he’s doing a presentation at a conference.  Hey, somebody’s gott brag about you, John.

nah nah nah nah

Big fat congratulations, buddy!

SecretGeek, aka Leon Bambrick. This is the guy who brought us the famous VB Refactoring menu in Whidbey (I’m pointing to my post on this because we already crashed him once with so many) . Have you read his blog lately? Are you even subscribed?

If you don’t know Bill Evjen – he wears a lot of hats. He is a Regional Director, an ASP.NET MVP, an ASPInsider, the leader of the St. Louis .NET User Group and most notably the founder and executive director of INETA. He also has recently become a prolific and interesting blogger. But Bill is also a prolific technical author. If you go to the home page of his blog you will see links to all of the above organizations as well as his many books and articles.

But that’s not even why I wanted to write this post. Here’s what I love about Bill’s books. When you are trying to learn something, reading his book is like having him sit there and explain it to you. He seems to know that in explaining a particular piece of technology, you may not know some of the background so he explains that to you. For example in his web services book, he walks through how to do some basic settings in IIS. I have always found that he speaks my language. He doesn’t explain things from the point of an administrator or a plumber, but from the perspective of someone who is trying to write corporate applications and gets stuck having to worry about a lot of the details that you might not necessarily have the time to become an expert in. I have told this to Bill before, but I thought I would share it.