Microsoft recognizes long time community contributions

Today,  I’m very happy to announce that Microsoft awarded me a Connected System Developer MVP (Most Valuable Professional) title for the work I’ve done in the local .NET community here in Trondheim. NNUG Trondheim was established in august 2002 with me as one of the founding board members, and since 2004 I’ve had the pleasure of being the chapter lead of a community full of smart and interesting people.

Although appearing in the same list of MVPs (the list is not updated as of today) as Christian Weyer, Michèle Leroux Bustamante, Juval Lowy, Lars Wilhelmsen  (country lead at NNUG) and many others makes me very humble, the Connected System Developer category suits me fine. I’ve been working with WCF for quite a while now, and my work on service oriented architecture is a perfect match for digging deeper into these technologies.

I also have some very interesting ideas for code name Oslo projects that I would like to explore, and my plan is to give a talk about creating DSL’s, models and custom runtimes at one of our user group meetings after the summer break. My goal is to show why it might be preferable in some scenarios to allow users to modify and compose their own applications at a higher abstraction level than traditional source code.

Pål Fossmo, who is a friend and colleague of mine, also received his MVP title in the category Visual C# today. This proves that if you’re enthusiastic and contribute to your local community, you will be recognized as a valuable professional. At least in the community, but also by Microsoft at a national and global level.

I don’t think I would have gotten my title without the help of Rune Grothaug (Community Manager at Microsoft) and Morten Wennevik (C# MVP), so I would like to thank them both for nominating me to the MVP program. Also thanks to everyone twittering congratulations to @joaroyen.

PS: I’m pretty sure this is not an April Fool’s joke, and now I just want to relax and enjoy some Alpine Legend on my Xbox 360 :)