MVP award

Just got an email with the subject "[MVP] Congratulations! You have received the Microsoft MVP Award".

At first I thought it was a spam and almost lost it! But then I read it again...

I'm still very surprised with the announcement and excited as well. The competency I've got the MVP award for is: Visual Developer - Client Application Development. This must be due to the activity in the our User Group and the subjects I used to cover in previous speaking engagements (WindowsForms and WPF).

MVP program offers many nice opportunities of connecting with fellow MVPs in the area and around the world. As an addition to that, you get the unofficial stuff directly from the Microsoft product teams and the ways to express your opinion.

Award is valid for one year and renewable based on the contributions to the community. I actually feel encouraged to do even more, as long as the time will allow. The ideas already started popping-up...

SQL 2005 Developers Marathon

We had successful event yesterday in the Cyprus College campus (Nicosia) about MS SQL Server 2005 called SQL Marathon. Chad delivered few sessions that were about all new features of SQL Server 2005 and the audience was very satisfied with the content.

We are looking forward to organize some larger scale events in November, mostly related to WinFX, Vista and Office 12.

CDNUG event #9: Introduction to WPF

I just returned home from tonight's User Group meeting where I spoke about the WPF (a.k.a. Avalon).

Must say that I'm not impressed how everything went, mostly because the demos I had prepared earlier didn't really work as expected. The content took me much more time than I ever thought it will and it might have been my mistake that I wanted to talk about EVERYTHING in a single hour. WinFX is a huge topic and the session supposed to be the intro to WPF - but at the end it took its toll. Few glitches with the January CTP of WinFX and Sparkle brought my demos to the ground but hopefully the audience got the idea what's hiding behind WPF and how powerful it is.

I was glad to see that there were lot of people interested in the subject - there were over 30 attendees - the most we had until now! Good lesson I learned from today is that I need to:

1. Prepare,
2. Prepare, and
3. Prepare.

That's it. Sessions need preparation, especially when working with the CTP stuff. I haven't tested the demos more than once each one and almost none of them worked. Another mistake was timing: I haven't timed myself well while preparing the content. It took me double time while presenting the material then while preparing it. In the upcoming months I hope to split the hard content in many small, specialized topics and present drill-down of each of the interesting features of WPF. As long as the time allows...