Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell, esteemed hosts of the .NET Rocks radio show, have decided to set off in their DotNetMobile (a 30 foot RV) to 15 US cities between April 19th and May 7th. What for, you ask? To meet up with .NET developers and show off the latest and greatest in Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0, of course. Each evening, they stop in a city and host a three hour event in front of a crowd (100-300) of developers , where Carl shows off media features in Silverlight 4 and their road trip tracking application, while Richard demos the web-performance-testing features of VS2010 using his portable server rig.

In the truest tradition of showmanship, before they take to the stage they have a special guest brought in – a veritable rock star of the Visual Studio world - whom they interview for an hour as a .NET Rocks episode. So far they've played host to Phil Haack (a Program Manager with the ASP.NET team working on ASP.NET MVC), Dan Fernandez (an Evangelism Manager in the Developer and Platform Evangelism team at Microsoft), and Scott Stanfield (member of the MSDN Regional Director community), to name just a few.

I love the way that the audience gets a chance to participate, ask questions and have a great laugh, as you can hear in the first episode; and along the way, the .NET Rocks guys are giving away great prizes (including .NET Reflector Pro, ANTS Memory Profiler licenses, and even 40" LCD TVs). Even more out of the ordinary, at each stop on the trip, one lucky attendee (who has entered the Ride Along competition) gets to jump in the RV with Carl and Richard and ride along with them to the next stop on the road trip. How cool is that! Richard told us: "Our first winner in Mountain View was Eric Ziko. I was looking for him to announce that he had won, when he found us and gave us a bottle of scotch he had brought just to say 'thanks for the great show'. We all had a toast from the bottle the next night when he headed back home." Cheeky!

There's still a few space for these events, but it’s 'First Come, First Served', so if you want to attend then you’d better register now.

We're grateful to Richard and Carl for giving us the opportunity to sponsor this major .NET event, and while I think that this is a fantastic way to reach out to the .NET developer community, it would be great to hear what you think about this road trip.

Cheers,

Laila