Thank you, Rob, for the very nice introduction.

This seems like a great opportunity to talk a little bit more about how together we'll continue to make great things happen with Visual Basic.NET and make your jobs better and easier -- and more fun.

This new role is very exciting. It integrates two things that I love: community / business building efforts and architecture / design.

Core to my job will be listening -- to each of you. You'll discover that I am open and candid. Of course, that means sometimes we'll disagree. For me, that's great because it's only through sharing different perspectives and arguing passionately will we be able to create new and better opportunities.

We’ll work together to establish a dialogue and to build trust. You can expect to see me at conferences, user groups, etc., to find out what you like and don’t like about VB.NET. What worries you about moving to it? What types of business problems do you regularly have to solve?

I’ll learn from you and take the knowledge that you have taught me to make this product the best RAD tool in the .NET family. This will take some time. But we’ll get there -- together.

Let me also share a little bit about my background so you may feel more comfortable in knowing that I will indeed bring this philosophy to all of our interactions.

First and most important, I use the very products for which I am accountable so I care deeply about how they work.

For the past 15 years, I’ve been working with Microsoft development tools including Visual Basic (all the way back to Basic under DOS) and Visual FoxPro (and all its earlier incarnations).

Learning, improving things and sharing knowledge are *very* important to me and building a community is critical to being effective at growing our skills.

While serving as CIO and partner of Flash Creative Management, a business strategy and technology consulting company, I programmed and managed teams of outstanding developers and people whose commitment to learning and growth was evident in the way that they shared their knowledge by speaking at conferences and writing articles.

I have presented at Tech Ed on Design Patterns and at other major conferences here and abroad, and have written books and articles on development tools and methods. I was lead architect for the Codebook and COMCodebook frameworks – a leading Visual FoxPro community based framework that provides for large-scale distributed system development -- and that was regularly enhanced and distributed freely to the community.

The big picture matters to me, too. We are all here to solve our clients' problems.

After Flash was sold to GoAmerica Communications, a publicly traded telecommunications (wireless internet) company, I served as CIO there. My technology team created an operational support system that ties together multiple disparate applications using an XML message-based infrastructure. This system also included an application using .NET.

So as you can see, I truly do love the promise that technology brings to solving business problems and what really turns me on is helping people grow in their knowledge and in the work that they do.

Your success will be my success and I am truly looking forward to speaking with you and working together. Please feel free to e-mail me (yag@Microsoft.com) - I promise to respond as quickly as I can. I look forward to meeting as many of you as possible at VS-Live...

Thanks.

yag