Next week I’ll be speaking at the Web Camps events in India. The web camps series, put together by my trusty teammate Jon Galloway, offers web developers a glimpse into all the new web-related stuff the ASP.NET and Visual Studio teams have been cooking. I’m looking forward to the trip, as I’ve never been further East than Sweden. My team has this habit of coming up with nifty out-of-office emails so I decided to make a map, originally thinking I’d jam the map into an email. The image ending up being pretty huge so I’m sparing the team the extra room in their mailboxes by sharing it here instead.

This should be a pretty neat trip. I’m thankful for the opportunities I get like this to talk about and demonstrate the awesome work the engineers do here. They make that part of the job easy. When you love a product as much as I’ve loved ASP.NET and Visual Studio for this long, the idea of showing folks how to use it and to give them some new tricks is cake. This sort of thing – talking about how awesome our products are and about the awesomer people involved in their creation – is the best part of my job. 

What makes that part of job difficult is the missing-of-family while I’m on the road. My wife is the most supportive woman you could have the luck to know and I’m the luckiest guy in the world for having her there to support me. My sons always miss me, so that’s the saddest part of every trip, but they know how it works so they’re usually pretty forgiving, as the code below demonstrates. Coming home to this familiar program is without a doubt the icing on the cake.

So tomorrow I’ll start my first trip to the other side of the globe. Wish me luck, and if you’re in the area, come on out to learn some great stuff about ASP.NET, Windows Azure and Visual Studio!