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.

Especially happy to hear this one. Eric is on my INETA Committee (User Group Rleations Committee). He runs the Chatanooga .NET User Group. He is just relentless in trying to help out other developers and other user group leaders. We can’t hold this guy back he has so much energy and passion. His energy benefits user groups all over his region and all over the world.

Hooray for Kate. She’s just became an MVP too. Well, she has been most valuable and very professional for a long long time. But the award is new. Kate is an MSDN Regional Director out of Toronto, author of numerous books (including the new Visual C++.NET KickStart), very involved wtih the Toronto.NET user group, a popular conference speaker and INETA speaker and just an all round really nice person. I finally met her last May after having so many people ask me if I knew her. We didn’t even need an introduction. Just looked at each other and said “Kate?“ “Julie?“ 🙂

Here you can read more about what Kate does and has done…

Sorry if I’m drooling, but has become a good friend and I’m just thrilled that she got the MVP award.

Ken Getz has been an MVP since the program began in 1994.

Kathleen Dollard has been an MVP for years.

While we are all very busy congratulating the brand new MVPs (as we should be and I am doing it as well), don’t forget there are many who have been MVPs year after year for a long time. I think they should be offered continued congratulations as well. The MVP program is growing because there are just so many more people getting very actively involved in the community, which is exciting. But do remember it’s roots. MVP status does not roll over. These people have been earning it year after year. Also, there are MVPs for every area of Microsoft technologies : consumer applications, windows operating systems and server systems, office applications and developer applications. 

Here is the mvp website www.microsoftmvp.com

It’s Scott Hanselman. Absolutely well-deserved. Scott almost missed his “congrats” email since Outlook dumped it into his spam folder! That makes me laugh because I think this is what happened to a few other very important emails that I waited for from Microsoft about participation in some beta programs. Luckily I wandered over to BetaPlace, logged in and found them on my page.

hooray, it’s James Avery, who seems to be attempting to keep an updated list. Eventually there will be a full list from Microsoft, but there is a little due diligence to be done in between.