The ASP.NET Team - Microsoft at it's best.
I jsut wanted to take an entry to give credit where credit is due.
Now, to say the ASP.NET team is a little unfair, becuase I have been finding a bunch of really good teams at MS. VSIP team, C# Team, BCL Team and ASP.NET Teams are my favorites though, mainly becuase they are the ones I speak with mostly :-)
Since 1.1, and much more noticibly since 2.0 and prerelease 3.0, the .net and asp.net teams have been ubber active on the forums, answering quickly, efficiently, and promoting a leanring process as opposed to creating robots by handing out answers. They keep releaseing great learning products that are flexible, extendible, and usually good enough to use as the core starting point on most apps.
Recently released BLINQ going along with LINQ and WinFX 3.0 stuff, the Table Providers for Profile that everyone wanted and where too lazy to do on their own, Endless blogging about actually useful stuff (well, mostly usefull), and believe it or not, most of these guys actually make it easy to find them and contact them directly, and usually reply quickly, or find someone who is the right person to help you. Not like (cough.... most support you will ever call to). I am not saying flud these guys with emails, but if you put some thought into a problem and get stuck, and the forums don't help you, chances are one of the guys on the right team can. I personally have been assisted by gurus like Scott Guthrie, David Ebbo, Danny Chen, Jeff Wilcox, Craig Skibo, Gaston Milano and countless others in the forum. Okay, we cna probably count them if we had access to their databases, since we are all coders, nevertheless you get my point.
Gaston has a really cool new starter kit on extensibilty for anyone who looks around his awsome blog.
So... MS may take time releasing Vista... but in the meantime... we get all the bits and pieces, the devs of the world get to prepare the world :-) for what's comming... ok, that was cheesy. But LINQ is fun, .NET is awsome... VS.NET is awsome... and you all know it. So enjoy the show while it lasts. And i recomend everyone keep up with BLINQ as it will save you worlds of time :-) Everyone thank Paula. ( Who I found out from the BLINQ site created the some of the more impressive Server Controls in 2.0, so we can all bow our hats there too ).