While attending the Central Ohio Day of .NET a few weeks ago, Josh Holmes introduced me to Jennifer Marsman, one of the community-focused Developer Evangelists for the Heartland District.  Jennifer works with Josh (RIA Architect Evangelist), Jeff Blankenburg (Developer Evangelist) and Brian Prince (Architect Evangelist).  If you’re not familiar with what a Microsoft evangelist is, check out this great post from Sarah.

As Jennifer points out in her “who am I” post, she has a broad range of experience and in the last year has jumped into many of the new tools and technologies coming out of Redmond including  “the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), Windows Workflow, Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO), ClickOnce, development on Windows Vista, Silverlight, the .NET Framework 3.5, and Visual Studio 2008.“ 

Before jumping into an evangelism role, she worked on the Microsoft campus in Redmond:  “My team’s goal was to map a computer user’s intent to an action that the computer can perform, beginning with the search and help domain.  To do this, we utilized machine learning techniques (Naïve Bayes and Decision Tree classifiers).  I personally designed the algorithms that determine the user’s intent from the data we collected, which earned me two patents. “

How cool is that?  Of course, if after reading that you’re not convinced she’s a geek, in 2007 she did a few episodes of CodeToLive on the XNA gaming framework (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4)!  I was recently reminded that she was the one who shaved Josh’s head at the first CodeMash conference in 2007 (another video here).

Jennifer is organizing the upcoming GiveCamp that I blogged about a couple days ago.  If you want to get involved in this very cool event, let her know!  As I said in my post, I plan on being there and hope to see plenty of my friends there as well.  What a great opportunity to hang out with smart people, write code and help others in the process.

While she hasn’t been blogging for very long, the one thing that really stands out about her blog is the “Featured Women in Technology” series she started in April.  Since Jennifer started the series last month, she has already highlighted four women including Carey Payette, the president of the Central Ohio .NET Developers Group.  Carey was instrumental in putting together the recent Central Ohio Day of .NET and also gave a talk on “Getting Started With IronRuby, the DLR and Silverlight” at the event.

Anyway, this post started because I really enjoy Jennifer’s blog and especially the “Featured Women” posts and wanted to let people know.  If you’re not already subscribed, you should do it now.