Back in March, I wrote about my grand plan for 2009 – my new year’s resolution. The plan was simple. I had to visit 12 different countries in 2009, preferably 12 countries I’d never visited before. Now, half way through the year it’s time to do status on the progress.

January

A business trip to Düsseldorf, Germany kicked off the plan. Beautiful city with very nice restaurants, bars and more Porche’s, Mercedes’ and BMW’s I’ve ever seen in one place.

February

Another business trip, this time to rainy London. Also, later the same month I went to Chişinău, the capital of Moldova. This is by far the most interesting place I’ve ever visited and I have a feeling that I might be the first tourist in that country. I can highly recommend visiting Moldova and I will definitely go back in maybe 5 years time.

March

Went to the MVP Summit in Seattle. It was my first time in the state of Washington, but my 5th trip to USA and my 14th state. It rained, but it didn’t change the fact that Seattle is a very nice city with very nice and outgoing people.

April

Malaga, Spain was the starting point of my Easter holiday. From there we drove to Gibraltar to see the wild monkeys and beautiful views and of course the new casino. You can actually see Morocco from there across the Mediterranean Sea. Then drove to Sevilla before returning home.

May

Visiting a friend in Stirling, Scotland, the home of William Wallace aka Mel Gibson in Braveheart. Drove around Loch Lomond and tried some excellent whisky along the way – I wasn’t driving. I then took a flight from Scotland to Düsseldorf to revisit the Vodafone mother ship before returning home.

June

Back in March I asked around the office if anyone wanted to join me on a trip to Amsterdam, Holland. 9 colleagues said “yes, please”, so off we went to one of the more fun places I’ve ever visited for reasons I will not share with you or anyone else. If you’ve been there you know why. If you haven’t been there, go before it’s too late.

June/July

I’ve been very busy at work and by travelling, so for the summer holiday I just wanted to relax by a pool somewhere warm. I did that on Corfu – a Greek island off of the Albanian coast. The only energy spent on that trip was getting into a cap to the ferry leaving for Sarande, Albania.

That concludes the first half of my grand plan. Next up is:

August: Fringe Festival in Edinburgh, Scotland and a trip to Boston
September: Weekend in Monaco to win big on the casinos
October: 11 days roundtrip to Iran

After that it’s either India with the family in November or Malta for Christmas. If the rest of the year turns out as stated here, then the grand plan succeeds. This grand plan also carries some of the blame for me not blogging much anymore.

In the past 6 months I’ve been involved in hiring a lot of ASP.NET developers. It was very interesting to learn just how different skill sets ASP.NET developers have. It also made it more and more clear that every developer we talked to would fit into one of three categories:

• The web developer
• The developer who build websites
• The ASP.NET super hero

Before looking deeper into the different categories I recommend you too check out how I define the ASP.NET framework 

The developer categories

With the ASP.NET definition in place it is now easier to look at the different categories of ASP.NET developers we have interviewed.

The web developer

Not many ASP.NET developers fall into this category. It’s usually the ones that come from classic ASP or PHP and made the switch to ASP.NET later on. They know everything about browser compatibility, JavaScript, CSS and the request life cycle. Also, they are usually not that hardcore in C# because they have mostly worked with client technologies. They are also more agnostic to the server-side platform and can work on PHP and RoR projects just as efficiently.

The web developer is also the kind of guy who thinks about new web technologies such as microformats and OpenID. This guy lives and breathes web.

The developer who builds websites

This is by far the biggest category. We’ve interviewed many developers who have worked with ASP.NET since it was first released. They have worked with everything from the database, data- and business logic, web services and ASP.NET. Most of them don’t care much for browser capabilities or JavaScript but they are hardcore C# developers. They have built many ASP.NET sites, but they are far from experts on the framework and stuff like modules and handlers are not where they have spent most of their time to say the least.

Their knowledge of the .NET framework, BCL and C# is immense, but they don’t qualify as web developers. They don’t live and breathe web, but their skills are just as needed in an ASP.NET project.

Take a web developer and a developer who build websites and put them in a room at the Romance Inn and wait 9 months. Then you get:

The ASP.NET super hero

This breed of developers is very difficult to get your hands on. They are a special race of individuals who know all about the ASP.NET framework and client-side technologies and are just as proficient in the more hardcore C# disciplines as well. ASP.NET is a very broad and diverse area because it is the point where the BCL, C#, XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, dependency injection, unit testing, mocking, AJAX etc. all come together in one project. To master all these disciplines takes an ASP.NET super hero.

The web developer and the developer who builds websites are both very important to a successful execution of a website project, but at least one ASP.NET super hero is essential in my opinion.