Over the past two years that I’ve been active in the Rails community I’ve had the opportunity to interact with many die-hard Microsoft developers and employees. Whether consulting for a client, or speaking at the Desert Code Camp I try to engage my fellow developers and discuss techniques that we can take away from other technologies which would make our code better. More often then not I’m met with the expected disbelief that ASP.Net could learn a thing or two from something like Rails. I mean come on, scripting languages are for hacking around, not for serious development right? Every now and then I meet someone from Microsoft who understands that their tools aren’t perfect, and is genuinely interested in making things better. Tim Heuer is one of those guys.

I first met Tim at the inaugural Desert Code Camp and was blown away that a Developer Evangelist from Microsoft would be interested in hearing about Ruby on Rails. I unfairly had a stereotype in my head which was completely wrong. Not only did Tim attend my talk, but he had already studied up on Rails and was interested in hearing my thoughts on what Microsoft could learn from this disruptive technology.

Over the last year as I’ve gotten to know Tim I continue to be impressed at his commitment to the development community. It is one thing to support your local Dot Net users groups, but Tim goes above and beyond by helping to organize events like the Open Source Web Developer Summit up at Redmond which I attended last fall as well as multiple meetups of technology experts from around the local region.

I had the opportunity to attend one of these meetups last Thursday evening as Tim had put together an amazing event bringing together developers from Java, PHP, Perl, Ruby and of course Dot Net at the Microsoft luxury suite at the Phoenix Suns game.

While I enjoyed the company of Josh, Anthony, Todd and all the others folks I got a chance to meet, I’ve got to say that the highlight of the night was definitely watching a NBA game in a catered suite stocked with everything that you could imagine.

In addition to getting to attend events like last week, and all of the great local developers that I’ve had a chance to meet, I’ve also had the pleasure of being introduced to another great local Microsoft Evangelist named Rob (?) as well as industry legends such as John Lam, Scott Guthrie and many others. All of these guys represent a new breed of Microsoft Evangelist. One who isn’t afraid to engage the open-source community and try to make their products better by actively listening to constructive criticism.

While I won’t be trading in my MacBook for a Vista Tablet anytime soon. I am excited to see Microsoft embracing new ideas, and I look forward to seeing what transpires out of the work that these guys are doing. Tim, Rob, John, Scott and everyone else, keep up the good work!