Tomorrow I'm heading for Seattle for the annual MVP summit. I just got renewed so I'm quite happy to be there as a full blown MVP. This is also the first time that I'll be visiting the US. I'm very excited about the whole thing because it means also for me the chance of going to Redmond itself, the "Mekka" for people that are into Microsoft technology.

We'll be arriving on Sunday after a flight of about 10 hours and on Monday stay in Seattle itself. Tuesday and Wednesday all sessions will be at Microsoft campus and Thursday again will be in Seattle. A lot of it will be under NDA but I hope to be able to blog about my adventure while I'm there.

If you're also going: I'm staying in the Sheraton hotel. I'm a very social person that likes to meet new people so don't be shy to come to me and say hi.

Grz, Kris.

Tim Sneath, a well known evangelist of Microsoft was in Belgium yesterday. I got invited for a meet and greet with him by Microsoft Belgium. The first part was technical, Tim talked about Silverlight and we had the opportunity to ask questions. It was very interesting for me. The other fun side about it was that I got to know new people as well. Something I enjoy a lot since I'm quite a social person.

Afterwards we went with the group to a restaurant and enjoyed a very tasty meal in good company.

Here are some pictures that were taken:

Grz, Kris.

I got the message that I won a HTC Dual Touch thanks to a contest of one of the sponsors (Ausy) on last Visug event. It's a nice phone with a bright screen. The only thing that's lacking is wifi. Too bad because I would've really loved that feature.

Grz, Kris.

Last Thursday I attended a Visug seminar about WCF. This session was presented by Juwal Lowy, a dedicated and well known employee of IDesign. The session was great, really great. Juwal's a great presenter that could even make the belgian crowd to laugh on several occasions. That might seem strange but most foreign speakers know how hard it is to interact with a Belgian audience that mostly doesn't make sound and watches the presentation with a lot of interest. I've already followed several WCF presentations during the last years (TechEd, tech days, ...) but this one was actually the one I liked best. Most presentations show a host and a client and then dive right into the config files. Not this one. We got shown little chunks at a time and more about the architecture. Not so much configuration but small samples which showed the stuff. I liked this approach a lot.

Grz, Kris.

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.

Join the conversation and explore how you can create next-generation Web experiences. Now, for the first time in Belgium, the MIX essentials conference brings you the latest information from the global MIX'08 conference held in Las Vegas in early March. With Keynote presentations from Steve Ballmer, and other international speakers, unveiling the latest Web-oriented solutions from Microsoft.

Hope to see you there too.

Grz, Kris.

It seems Microsoft recently put up a couple of new sites that might be of interest to you:

• A revamped site dedicated to the Expression family: There's lot to find already, tutorials, starter kits, forums, ... While the Expression family's mostly targeted towards designers I also used Expression Web in the past and currently am taking my first steps in Blend 2.5 preview to get to know Silverlight 2 a bit better.
• TaskMarket: a new place for freelancers to find each other for short term assignments.
  

Grz, Kris.

I just found out about this one: Silverlight Essential Training. Extra video material for free. Man, I really need a couple of weeks off soon to dive into the cool stuff.

Grz, Kris.