I’m pleased to announce that I’ve recently received the Microsoft MVP Award. This is not something that you can apply for. It came from the recommendations my peers and the people in the Microsoft Offices in Southfield for my contributions to the community. I’m honored to be recognized in this fashion and placed in the company of Tom Barnaby, Patrick Steele, Eric Maino, Martin Shoemaker, Richard Hale Shaw and all the other MVPs.

Now for those of you who know me – you’ll get a giggle out of the category because I was awarded the MVP in the C# category.

It’s also exciting because my company, SRT Solutions, now has among it’s principals a MVP (Me) and a Regional Director (Bill Wagner).

	My MVP Profile
	Josh Holmes’s MVP Award Profile
	https://mvp.support.microsoft.com/profile=9501B249-FBB1-4E52-B28A-ACB1C2A65091
	MVP Award Site
	More information about the MVP Award Program
	http://mvp.support.microsoft.com/MVPINTRO
	Official Regional Director Site
	More information about the Regional Director Program
	http://msdn.microsoft.com/isv/rd/

PreEmptive Solutions, the creaters of the Dotfuscator, have a new blog and it’s on MSDN.

Be sure to send them all of your great questions about how and why to obfuscate. The Dotfuscator Team loves getting good questions…

	.NET Obfuscator
	PreEmptive’s MSDN Blog
	https://blogs.msdn.com/obfuscator/

It’s part tech, part fun, all Martin…

	Tablet UML News Blog
	Martin Shoemaker’s Blog
	http://www.tabletumlnews.com/

I’ll be speaking the Dayton .NET Developers Group on 8/24/2005 about WSE 3.0 and ASP.NET 2.0.

I was invited my Jim Holmes. He’s no relation to me – just a good friend.

John Hopkins will also be speaking there on the Dotfuscator and what it’s capabilities are.

	Dayton .NE Developers Group
	.NET Users Group in Dayton Ohio
	http://www.daytondevgroup.net/

Effective C#, my business partner’s (Bill Wagner) book, was translated into Hungarian. I just think that it’s cool!

	Hatékony C#
	Hatékony C# == Effective C#
	http://www.kiskapukiado.hu/main.php?SHOW_BODY=books&OP=detailed&PROD_ID=102

I know that it’s not a big deal to some others, but I’m really happy that I’ve got commenting available on my blog now.

Try it out – comment on this post. 🙂

Keep in mind that it is a moderated comment channel so there will be some lag between post and visible.

I’m honored to be in INETA Speaker Bureau with such influential developers as Martin L. Shoemaker, Michele Leroux Bustamante, Rocky Lhotka and Juval Lowy, just to name a few. INETA helped get the Great Lakes Area .NET Users Group (GANG) off the ground by supplying great speakers, such as Richard Hale Shaw, Chris Kinsman and Tom Barnaby (Now with Microsoft and I can’t find his new blog), as well as advice on logistical setup of the meetings and the user group leaders forums. My goal is to help other user groups as much as these great speakers have helped my group.

There were 9 of us added at the same time:

John Alexander
Miguel Castro
Bill Evjen
Julie Lerman
Chris Menegay
Ted Pattison
Les Pinter
Bill Vaughn
Me

It gets better as I’ve already been scheduled to speak through INETA at the Northwest Ohio .NET User Group on October 25th.

Tim Landgrave, Regional Director from Kentucky and a great speaker, will be doing the main presentation on “Developing Enterprise Class Web Services using the .NET Framework” starting at 7:00.

I’m going to give the tutorial session on “Introduction to Web Services” starting at 6:00.

We will also be doing unprecedented giveaways as we give away a copy of VS.NET 2003 Professional, a number of books including Writing Secure Code 2, ASP.NET 2.0 books and more, t-shirts and more.

Bring a friend to increase your chances of winning!

Hello Listeners,

If you are in the Detroit area, please fill out our survey to help me and the rest of the board guide the group in the ways that can best server the South-Eastern Michigan area. We are doing what we think is best, but we’d all like some feedback, especially from those that are not coming currently.

If you are not coming, please let us know why and what would entice you to come.

If you are coming, please let us know what we are doing right and what we are doing slightly less that perfectly.

Either way, please pass this URL around to all of your friends, co-workers and anyone else that might be in our demographic. That includes .NET Developers (Obviously), those interested in .NET, managers who managed developers and so on. Post this on your blogs, email it, tell people about it and other mechanisms that you can think of to get it around to your friends.

Thank you,
Josh Holmes
VP of GANG
Program Chair of GANG

Drew Robbins was the first Dancing DE… Andrew Duthie has raised the bar with his rendition of Love Shack! I wish that I could have gotten the whole thing on video but I did the best that I could here. This was at the MVP Summit 2005. There was a party at the Science Fiction Museum with a kareoke bar upstairs.

Two extra fun bits:
1) That’s his boss, Kim, with him. She’s the manager for all of the DE’s in the Eastern District of the US.
2) He’s pretty good – in fact, he used to have a band before Microsoft took all of his spare time. Oh yeah and he had children so he didn’t have time anyway…

Update: I’ve been corrected – he’s damn good!

	Andrew’s Video Performance
	https://joshholmes.com/images/DuthieLoveShack.wmv
	Andrew Duthie’s Blog