Interestingly enough, there aren't any Google ads for Visual Studio conferences. Weird.

So, to try to get out of this rut I'm in, I started visiting my favorite .NET sites again. You know who they are. Drayton. Sells. Ruby. Fell. Lam. Rammer. Gentile. McCusker. Allen. Caetano. Steele. Marsh. Rudd. Berglund. Bock. Restrepo. Rawlings. Wilson. Cook. Kilic. Graf.

Some interesting tidbits.

1) Drew Marsh's company got $6.5 million in financing. Awesome. Will this be the beginning of a trend? We desperately need to see new software development companies start up. The farm system has been decimated and that means that Microsoft and Apple haven't had good small companies to gobble up (Microsoft, in particular, has relied on acquiring small companies to grow in the past -- FrontPage, PowerPoint, WebTV, Hotmail are all examples of Microsoft products gained through acquisitions).

2) Chris Sells new Web Service conference looks awesome. I'm very jealous that Chris is doing this through a bootstrap. Start really small, get awesome speakers. I'll bet that Chris does very well in two years when .NET 2.0 comes out (oh, by the way, the code name for .NET 2.0 is Whidbey, which is an island up in Washington).

3) Justin Rudd is complaining about being forced to take paid time off this week. Oh, Justin, I know some people who were given the week off without pay. I'm glad to hear your wife is doing OK, though.

4) Jason Bock is sending me a copy of his CIL book. Awesome on getting it finished Jason!

5) If I could figure out how to get attendees to conferences, I'd be a well-paid consultant. Heh. Why not an affiliate program where you get $50 for each attendee that gives your name when that attendee registers and puts your name on the registration page? Shirley Brothers did that and bootstrapped her ASP.NET conference into a pretty big deal.

6) Microsoft's new Web Matrix application is pretty darn interesting. I'm playing with it now. It's a little more than one meg download (well, you need the 20+MB .NET runtimes, but I already had those). It includes a Web server and a Visual-Studio-like development environment for building ASP.NET sites. Oh, and it's free. Cool!

7) Brad Wilson's ".NET Guy" Weblog isn't working for me right now. I get a blank page. Weird.

8) Thanks to Serdar Kilic's weblog I learned that the "win_tech_off_topic" mailing list's message traffic has seen exponential growth lately. (I've been a member for a while, maybe that's the cause. ).

Anyway, it's nice to see that developers are having fun with .NET. You guys got me away from the boob tube and I'm grateful for that. Keep coding!

Oh, Greg Reinacker wants to be the top "Greg" so he wants everyone to link to him. Heh. I'm sure he'll be the top Greg now.