Kevin,

My vote goes to the people who offered something great free of charge to the Fox community. This is why I nominated Cesar Chalom, this is why my second vote goes to Carlos Alloatti and Jim Nelson.



>My vote would go to Les Pinter, Rick Strahl, or Sergey (in that order) for this year. George Goley would be deserving is not for that fact that he abandoned VFP too early in the game (didn't he leave VFP entirely when he went to work for MSFT?) He was definitely energetic and brought a lot of excitement to the field. However, while everyone else is deserving, only one can win each year.
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>Glad to see several agreed with the idea of Les. Another (posthumous) is Drew Speedie. Regardless of whatever happened on that tragic day in 2005, Drew's "body of work" (and this is why, if anything, I prefer the idea of a "Hall of Fame") was enormous. And not only that, Drew packed more meaningful help in a 75 minute presentation than many could in twice the ime.
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>Rick won in 2002 - I'll ask Naomi to issue a public spanking for being too "lazy" to look. <s>
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>On Rick....if you look at the list, only one of them has, IMO, "moved on", and that's Rick. However, there's plenty of irresponsibility in how these Fox websites have positioned Rick ouside of Fox. For instance: "He's among the first (and so far only) respected authors who are publicly exposing and demonstrating, in a constructive manner, what's NOT right with .NET and VS.NET." Whoever wrote that line is woefully uninformed of the authors/speakers who have had plenty of things to say about .NET (and have done it in such a way to get the product team's attention). I'm not taking away anything from Rick (who made many great observations and one or two that weren't so great) , but there is far too much of a "he's OUR guy" at the core, and that's just plain ridiculous.
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>But regardless - don't you think this entire thing makes Fox look, well, "small?" For instance, suppose someone started something similar for SQL Server. The Fox community has a rich and great history and some of these giants have set a standard for community leaders. They really didn't need this.