Earlier this week, Microsoft announced a number of promotions, among them Scott Guthrie, who is now Corporate Vice President, .NET Developer Division (executive profile – promotion press release). Many of you know Scott from his extremely popular blog, on which me mixes news and roadmaps for the products he oversees with technical walkthroughs and tutorials on the latest and greatest technologies. He’s one of the nicest, humblest people I know, especially among successful technologists and bloggers. He always has time to answer questions from anybody, with great patience, and while I’m sure he’s human like the rest of us, I’ve never known him to lose his temper or let pride or self-importance get in the way of helping developers. Because I don’t expect him to blog about his promotion, I thought it best if someone did, so I am :). If he’s helped you as a developer, leave a note of congratulations or send Scott an email (scottgu at microsoft) letting him know.

I definitely think Scott is a rising star at Microsoft with a bright future. I’m very pleased to see that Microsoft’s upper management recognizes this as well. Among Scott’s current responsibilities are the teams that build the CLR, ASP.NET, Silverlight, WPF, IIS, Commerce Server, and the Visual Studio tools for Web, Client, and Silverlight development. That’s a lot of really cool technology that is making/keeping it fun to be a developer in the Microsoft space and improving Microsoft’s competitive advantage against the likes of Java, Flash, and competing web server platforms. As many people know, Scott is also the “father of ASP.NET”, having written the first prototype of the platform. His responsibilities have certainly grown in the last nearly 10 years, yet he still finds time to write all of his own demos and blog posts!

On a recent trip to Seattle, I had the opportunity to have dinner with Scott and a few others. At the same time, a larger dinner was going on nearby with the rest of the folks who were in town for this particular Microsoft event. After dinner, it was fairly late (and a work night, naturally), and while most folks might have just decided it’d been a long enough day and go home, Scott headed over to the other restaurant so he could talk to the other community members who were in town. This isn’t the exception with Scott, this is pretty much his standard behavior, and I think it’s one of the many reasons he is so popular among the developer community. I’m definitely impressed, and a big fan.

Congratulations, Scott. Well deserved.