Sunday, October 08, 2006

MVP Paul Yao can't code (or is .NET too hard?)

For more than a year ago, I visited the head quarter of my previous company's in Everett, Washington, USA to meet up with some colleagues and our new boss. One evening there was a WE.DIG (User group for MS, .NET) meeting and me and my friend wanted to participate. So we signed up on a website for that meeting, went to it and enjoyed the free pizza. This user group is run by Mr Paul Yao, a well known MS book writer and MVP.

Apparently the sign up included adding us to the mailing list from hell. For more than a year, I've tried to unsubscribe from the newsletter for WE-DIG. As I live in Sweden, I'm no longer interested in events in Seattle. So every month when I get a newsletter, I click on the "Unsubscribe" link; get a nice "You were unsubscribed from the list", and every next month I get a new newsletter. This grows old on me quite quickly. I've multipled times unsubscribed from it, emailed Paul Yao and the board for WE-DIG to be removed from the list. But no such luck.

So my conclusion to this is, either Paul Yao is an evil person that never implemented an unsubscibe functionality; or he can not code diddly squat. I mean how hard is it to implement a mailing list functionality, there must be tons of reference implementations out there? Or is it just to hard to implement a mailing list in .NET? Is it .NET that throws an unhandled exception when someone tries to unsubscribe?

For you how don't know who Paul Yao is, he has been writing books about MS tech for more than 20 years, so he should know what he is doing. Or perhaps he doesnt..... And this is my last attempt to be removed from the mailing list.