I just noticed this message in my inbox:

Dear Kris Van Der Mast,

Congratulations! We are pleased to present you with the 2008 Microsoft® MVP Award! The MVP Award is our way to say thank you for promoting the spirit of community and improving people’s lives and the industry’s success every day. We appreciate your extraordinary efforts in ASP/ASP.NET technical communities during the past year.

I admit that I'm at least a bit proud of myself. Especially because I was able to help out people that were in need of getting into the right direction. And for the next year? Well I'll try to do my best to keep on helping the community.

Grz, Kris.

Today I was one of the people that stood on the "Ask the expert" booth at Techdays Belgium 2008. It was the first time I did this and I really enjoyed it. If Microsoft would ask me again I would be happy to help them out again on the next occasion. The fun thing was that I got to know a lot of new people, even at the booth itself. This is something I really enjoy, talk to people, get to know new people, interact and share ideas/views with them on technology.

I also got the chance to help people out with their particular questions just like I would on the ASP.NET forums but this way it's more direct of course because you're talking to the person right in front of you. I found it a bit strange though that one of the askers was creating ASP.NET applications for quite some time but didn't found out about the ASP.NET dedicated website. I showed the wealth of information that can be found over there and he really enjoyed seeing that and immediately wrote down the url. The most asked question however seemed to be this one: "When is the Entity Framework shipping date?". That was also the one we couldn't answer at our booth unfortunately.

Grz, Kris.

Always nice to start the year like this. 2 of my friends I know of became MVP recently:

• Frederik Vandeputte
• Gill Cleeren

Congratulations boys!

Grz, Kris.

Today I'm celebrating my lustrum on the ASP.NET forums. That also means that I started developing with .NET 5 years ago officially. I learned a lot in those 5 years and not only on a technical level. With this post I would also like to thank Patrick Vanoverbeke for picking me out of the crowd to start developing ASP.NET applications back then and giving me the opportunity to grow on a steady pace.

First I was more of a person that asked questions, trying to seek knowledge for problems. After a while I suddenly noticed a certain post, can't remember which one though, that I could provide the answer to. I did and got a friendly reply with a big thank you back. Well that gave a good feeling so I started out giving more and more answers. Somehow I got noticed by the moderation team and when they asked to join them I became a moderator to help even more people out. This year I also became an MVP thanks to my strong participation on the forums.

Grz, Kris.

Since I became an MVP I also got into the VIP pool of people. This was my first time but it was nice to see some other Belgian MVP's but also others that made it to the VIP pool thanks to their outstanding community awareness. First we had an informal meeting as to what direction Microsoft sees the community going and where the VIPs see it going. Not all people were developers but also IT pro's were there. Some of them I already knew but most of these people were strangers to me. After we had introduced ourselves there was an IT pro that came to me and said: "thanks for the help on the forums". Apparently he had asked a question on the ASP.NET forums and I helped him out (and actually gave a correct answer too).

After that meeting we settled down in our hotel rooms, a very nice hotel in Ostend (Golden Tulip Bero). After that we gathered for a small game in Ostend where we had to find several key locations and put a card on a board that corresponded with something we could see in the neighbourhood. It was fun and actually the team I was in did win. After the competition we had a nice dinner in the Kursaal (a known building in Ostend). After that we gathered in a lounge bar with a lot of possible cocktails. I had some nice chats with several people that evening/night and not everything was tech related.

The day afterwards, which came too soon as I nearly couldn't sleep during those 4 hours I spent in the hotels bed, I was the first of the group to eat breakfast. But soon several other members of the group joined me so I immediately had some new conversations going on.

Normally at 10 o'clock the group would gather to play some other games but some of us had to leave. I was one of them as I went to Westend to team up with my parents.

Actually I had a lot of fun and want to thank the people that made it possible for me to attend it and I hope to see the other VIP people back soon.

I just received this email from Microsoft:

Dear Kris van der Mast,

Congratulations! We are pleased to present you with the 2007 Microsoft® MVP Award!
The Microsoft MVP Award is our way of saying thank you and to honor and support the significant contributions you make to communities worldwide. As a recipient of Microsoft’s Most Valuable Professional award, you join an elite group of technical community leaders from around the world who foster the free and objective exchange of knowledge by actively sharing your real world expertise with users and Microsoft.  Microsoft salutes all MVPs for promoting the spirit of community and enhancing people’s lives and the industry’s success everyday.  To learn more about the MVP Program, visit: www.microsoft.com/mvp.
Your extraordinary efforts in Visual Developer - ASP/ASP.NET technical communities during the past year are greatly appreciated.

Of course I'm very happy with this recognition and I hope to be able to help out even more people during the next years to come by writing articles, giving presentations, and being a moderator on the ASP.NET forums.

Grz, Kris.