Helper Of The Month (HOTM)
Congratulations to Pyash, aka Pyash for winning the November 2004 HOTM. Pyash overhauled Emdek about half way through the month and never looked back.
.NET Fella
Congratulations to Iulian Ionescu aka iulianionescu for winning the November 2004 .NET Fella Award. Iulian's name has come up several times when the vbCity leaders have been discussing the .NET Fella award and it's great to see him finally get this award in recognition of Iulian's excellent contribution to vbCity.
New Features
We added a method of contacting the vbCity members by including a link on the member's profile, e.g. Send a message via email to Shandy. This can be used for contacting other vbCity members but at the same time does not reveal their email to the sender.
Serge has also been working hard on the new look devCity site and some of the moderators been busy testing it. It looks excellent, especially the article submission system. We are hopeful it should be live by the end of December.
Leader News
One piece of extremely sad news is that Edward, our 2nd longest serving vbCity leader has stepped down from being a vbCity Leader. vbCity will be losing a great servant and Edward will be sorely missed. Edward joined in April 2001 and had been a leader since May 2002.
Other News
Serge announced the Beta release of PrettyCode.Print for .NET. A few of the moderators (including myself) have been participating in the Beta test program.
Serge has also put out a request for vbCity members to send him a postcard from their home town. I sent mine at the beginning of the month.
vbCity also introduced a survey about community sites with a chance for 5 individuals to win $50 for taking part.
vbCity statisician Lazyjay made an interesting observation in the moderator's forum. For the last 3 months .NET posts have out numbered VB.Classic posts in the vbCity forums. So although rumours about VB.Classic's death are generally exagerated I think this is another indication that the writing is on the wall.
At the end of November we had a total around 344,300 posts and 133970 registered users at vbCity.