It has gone in a blur but it was exactly one year ago I was awarded an MVP for my community service to Windows Live Developers. Always fun to be awarded on April Fools Day. The name has changed, I’m now a Windows Live Platform MVP.
Since then we have had several releases of Virtual Earth (and PetaBytes of new data), a VE exam released, QuickApps with sample code to learn from, ASP.NET 3.5 controls and many a name change.
I kept busy building the http://viawindowslive.com community site that so many of you have now contributed to with fellow MVP Bronwen Zande. We presented at various events in Australia, recently we travelled around Australia presenting 9 session on Virtual Earth and SQL 2008 Spatial. I took on the role of Moderator for the VE forums marking hundreds of posts as answered and clearing a few issues up here and there. Also there was a great community project to provide intellisence for Virtual Earth, I helped as much as I could. I’ve enjoyed helping people, meeting people and hearing your ideas and feedback.
Of coarse my year has had negatives as well. I’ve learnt an important lesson that there are people out there that like to exploit hard working developers for their personal gain, taking credit for other peoples work and adding no value themselves. It is a real shame.
So what lies ahead of us this year? Silverlight2 is going to play a huge part for many of us. Those that have come to know me will understand that I like new technology and visualisations of large data sets is a great challenge. With the news of a Silverlight version of Virtual Earth at Mix and tantalising deep zoom examples I hope to be sharing with all of you some very cool code this year. Will we see Photosynth this year? Will we have Silverlight Live controls? Will MSFT acquire Yahoo? A busy year it is sure to be.
Big thanks to Rose and the MVP team, it is a great program.