I did my first also in 2000. I think it was at Connections in New Orleans in May 2000. Hard to recall that conference being that Jim Booth was there and Bourbon Street was only a block away...heh. My scariest were in 2001 and 2002 when I had to be at the keynote with the Team on-stage and actually look like I knew what I was doing.

Personally, I don't even respond to speaker calls lately...probably why I don't get very many anymore. I mean, I *could* probably get an invite to speak if I pushed it but I just feel that there are others out there with more to impart and that if I took a speaker role I had doggone be sure that I am not supplanting someone who has more value to the community.

Some of us are just more relevant that others in 2008. You're one of them and all power to you.

>As of the MVP Summit, Calvin was still on the VB team.
>
>I did my first conference presentation in 2000 at Whilfest. The topic was COM+. I had been preaching n-tier since before then.
>
>>The last I heard, Calvin was part of the VB team. Formerly, he was part of VS Data as all of use were. Frankly, Calvin is a good fit anywhere - the man is versatile to the extreme.
>>
>>I've been working extensively with ASP.Net recently with VB code and I gotta tell you...it's just not that hard. Sure there are some weirdnesses and unintuitive stuff but one could say the same for VFP. Years ago I posted that VFP people could take over their world because we understand architecture and they only understand code syntax. With my latest experiences, I still believe that.