I'm kind of becoming one of "the .NET guys" on the team. I think that I have the most experience with the .NET framework in general out of the team (though my officemate has more knowledge directly relevant to FrontPage). It's nice to feel at least marginally useful to the team... I occasionally get people coming into my office asking me questions about ASP.NET or collections or generics or database access. That's cool. The biggest difference between my officemate and I is that my officemate is the hardcore C++ lover who hates managed memory and garbage collection, and I'm the hardcore VB lover who can't stand to be bothered by the nitty-gritty details of whether you put the word "static" in the header file, the cpp file, or both. We're like the odd couple.

I decided that I'd kind of like to be the Avalon guy in the future. (Avalon, greatly simplified, is the new UI framework for future versions of Windows.) I'm the natural fit; I love UI, and I like the .NET framework... most of the people on my team aren't fans of either. I'm sure that Office will use Avalon at some point; maybe some Avalon stuff is even happening in Office 12. If I were the team's Avalon expert, not only would I be useful, but I could also get assigned features that were more up my alley than what I'm currently working on, which I'm beginning to regret having experience with.