Alentus has always been one of the ASP.NET hosts out in the front of the pack. It is where my own website and also the Vermont.NET site is hosted for nearly 4 years.

I just happened to cruise to their home page and saw that it has been totally spiffed up! That struck me because I have watched their “visual branding” evolve over the years. They really now finally have a good solid look that evokes the professionals that they are.

I also see they’re now hosting WordPress and DotNetNuke.

They now have a basic $8.95 ASP.NET 2.0 hosting plan. I tend to stay the heck away from hosting that is that low-priced because it is usually cheap for a reason. But this is no “budget” host. They are very technical and knowledgable about ASP.NET.

Though they offered to let me have some space on a test ASP.NET server before RTM, I have been too busy to update any of my sites. But a new VTdotNET site is in the works and it is time! Yay.

Kudos guys.

I was nicely surprised to see Korby Parnell in Milwaukee at Deeper in .NET.  Luckily for me, the one session I had to miss, Scott Hanselman’s (I was in my room doing one last run through of my talk), Korby has laid out in detail. But not so much technically as about what an unbelievabley phenomenal presenter Scott is. I laughed when I read that Scott makes fun of VB programmers who comment using this

‘//this is my comment

which I do in the demo code for presentions because it’s so much more obvious than a little apostrophe.

Scott hadn’t seen my demo so it was a funny coincidence.

If you want more tips about what makes a speaker a great speaker, check out Korby’s homage to Scott.

Posted from BLInk!

So, there was much ado about somethng when Gretchen announced she was leaving Microsoft. I love that Korby referred to her as a Microsoft Legend and almost wrote a blog post about that. She is something of a folk legend (I don’t mean that as in “imaginary” though) for what happened when she and Zoe started the JobsBlog as opposed to, say the MSDN “Microsoft Legend” program which highlights some of the best selling authors in our industry.

Michael Kaplan pointed to where Gretchen landed and it’s really great. She and Zoe have come back together to create a business which leverages their extreme experience as recruiters to offer assistant to technology job seekers and technology job seekees. JobSyntax. Excellent! Go girls!

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

Ken Levy has written a wonderful historical post tying all of these things together. As I have blogged in the past, Ken was something of a Wunderkind in the FoxPro world back in the day. I had no idea how extensive and impressive the rest of his background was. The story he weaves in this post, becomes, in the end, a lovely welcome to Danny Thorpe (if you don’t know who this is, it’s another great excuse to read this blog post!) who has just joined the Windows Live team.

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

Congratulations to Lora Heiny (and that great support staff of hers) on this big milestone for TabletPCPost. Loren Heiny (that great support staff of hers) reports that the top downloaded app from there is TEO -an ink add-on for Outlook (must be thanks to this post I wrote last year (just kidding)).

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

Pablo Cibraro answers gazillions of questions in the WSE newsgroup. He also follows up with a lot of them too. I am extremely happy to see that his generosity with his time and his knowledge has been recognized by Microsoft. His award is in Connected Systems Developer. He is also doing a lot of work with WCF.

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

My i.m. pal Michal Chaniewski has just (finally) become an MVP. Michal is one of the most connected guys in the .NET community in Poland. I’m so happy to see him get recognized. I met Michal when I noticed in his blog that he was from Poland and learned that he had lived in the small city that part of my family (generations past) came from. The town was called Langhfur but the name was changed to something wtih lots of w’s, r’s, s’s and z’s and maybe a vowel thrown in for fun that I couldn’t pronounce for the life of me! Something like a great chocolate torte that is all eggs, sugar and chocolate with a teaspoon of flour added.

He also told me that Maja Ciemienga has become the first female MVP in Poland! Yay. Maja is the INETA lead for Poland. Here is Maja’s blog – if you can read Polish!

In addition to sharing all of the great computer and programming knowledge that breeds in his amazing brain, Scott Hanselman has always been very “out” about his diabetes in an effort to share his lessons, spread what knowedge he can and aid in pushing the envelope with respect to the technology that exists for those with diabetes.

Now Scott, his wife and Team Hanselman are walking in a fundraiser for the American Diabetes Association. There are a lot of reasons to support him in this, whether it’s in thanks for all that he has done for your own personal programming skills, his contributons to the .NET community, because Scott’s just a great guy or even just to support a really good cause.

Read more on Scott’s blog and find out how to help Team Hanselman acheive their goal of raising $10,000.

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

Some might say that Doug Reilly is making lemonade from lemons, though I think that his health situation is much more sour than a lemon and the work he is doing is much sweeter and more nutritious than lemonade.

Doug is a fellow developer, and ASPInsider and an author who has been battling a really tough illness for a long time. He has an article out about being responsible about dealing with your clients and your commitments when big things happen in your life. It is a valuable read for anyone in consulting.

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

For those of you who are all rss all the time, you may not have noticed the beautiful new Community Server site that dotnet.org.za has switched to. Now I see on Thea’s blog that it was Armand who did the job

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org