Keyvan Nayyeri

My blog subscribers would remember that earlier this year during the new Persian year holidays I had a short trip to Shiraz and Isfahan, wrote about my trip, and uploaded a huge batch of photos to Flickr. It’s a matter of a fact that Iran is saturated with historical sites and natural attractions very suitable for tourism, but after the Islamic Revolution, the new regime hasn’t done much to maintain these sites and advertise to attract more people to come, visit, and enjoy them.

Fellow .NET community members, specifically those who are active in the ASP.NET development, should know Mads Kristensen as one of the ASP.NET community leaders, Microsoft ASP.NET MVP, and the founder of BlogEngine.NET that is one of the very prominent and widely-used blog engines powered by ASP.NET.

At that time Mads had seen my photos, and as a very active tourist who has travelled to many countries, he told me about his interest to come and visit these places. Fortunately it didn’t take that long for him to make his travel arrangements and finally he arrived at Tehran with a group of friends yesterday.

Mads and his group have a very busy schedule to go to Shiraz, Yazd, Isfahan, and Kashan in the next days and leave Iran, but I was lucky to meet him in Tehran tonight.

I spent a few hours with Mads and one of his friends, Tobias Haagen Michaelsen, who's also a professional Software Developer.

Since Microsoft is not that old and after our revolution in 30 years ago, there were comparatively less tourists coming to Iran, I think that Mads Kristensen is the first prominent .NET community leader who’s coming to Iran.

We had a traditional Persian dinner together (even though I was on one of those bad diets and couldn’t eat anything more than a few pieces of Iranian Kebab) and talked about Iran’s history, all these distinct races living in Iran, our culture, our customs, my own plans, and of course, the software world.

Mads and his friends are going to leave Tehran tomorrow but they’ll stay in other cities for some days and visit many places in different central areas. I hope that he and his buddies enjoy their trip to Iran and this makes good memories for them from our country and our people.