post and was surprised to see him praising the aesthetic value of VB.NET.

Am I mistaken or has the collective self-esteem of millions of VB.NET programmers just risen considerably?

Perhaps the word 'just' is a bit of a stretch since the post was actually written several weeks ago. I would have come across it sooner, but I am currently living in mortal fear of my RSS Reader which has somehow managed to swell in size to a couple of hundred subscriptions and now spends all of my computer's spare CPU cycles calculating evil plots to take over the world. But I digress...

For those of you who have never worshiped at the alter of Don, here are his

. Besides being one of the original designers of SOAP, he's also authored of a

in the DevelopMentor "Essential" series that I wasn't quite smart enough to fully grok the last time I tried reading them. If you've been around long enough to have had the pleasure of working with COM, then you probably recognize the "COM is Love" phrase that he coined

To put it in historical context, he was a full-fledged geek rock-star when

was still busy popping zits.