Well, I received my third consecutive Microsoft Most Valuable Professional Award. This is an award that is given out to professionals who promote and show a high level of expertise with Microsoft technologies. I was awarded it the first time three years ago for my involvement as a moderator on the Asp.Net forums and as a core team member of the popular Asp.Net portal DotNetNuke. I really did not expect to receive the award again this year as over the past year, I have stepped down as an Asp.Net moderator and I have not been as active with DotNetNuke and the MS forums as I was in the previous years. I have participated just not to the same level as previously. I did participate in the update of the DotNetNuke Portal book from the core team. Actually I did a lot of the updating as everyone else was really busy and I had the time.

Well, I’m really stoked about this as I really wanted to be invited back to Redmond to participate in the MVP conference. The last one I went to was really great and there was so much information that was shared on upcoming MS technologies. I get freebies as part of the award too. The trip to Redmond only cost Airfare and they put me up in a first class hotel in Downtown Seattle and took care of all the bills. The hotel alone was 200 bucks a night. Last year I received a MSDN subscription to Team System which would have cost $10K if I would have had to buy it. And then there is always the money to spend in the Microsoft Company Store. My kid always loves this freebie as I usually buy him games for him out of the store. Everything in there is supper cheap compared to what you would have to pay retail so this goes a long way on games.

I guess I will need to change my resolution a little and start back posting more in the MS forums. I need to spend some time there anyway as I have a couple of interesting DotNetNuke modules that I want to build this year.