I've had the privilege to share the TechEd stage with Steve Swartz this year at Barcelona. Our 6 talks on the Connected Systems story and the themes that will be motivating our work for the next 3-4 years were great fun to do and were very well received. Over the next several weeks, I'll be writing about the middle 4 talks (Logic, Data, Presentation, Identity and Access) here. I'll also post excerpts of a larger application scenario that I've shown in one of these talks.

The reason for my silence on the blog over the past several months was a mix of self-restraint and being quite busy between work and getting settled over here in the US. The more interesting aspect of that is certainly the "self-restraint" story, since I am probably not really known for that. J

One of the great things that I am finding about working here at Microsoft is that it's absolutely possible to cause stuff being fixed that one considers broken. So instead of loudly complaining about them in a public forum, I much rather go and talk to the respective people. Complaining loudly will just annoy them and reduce the chances of stuff getting fixed. In addition to that, I am not writing any less or about vastly different topics than I have been, but now most of that is directed towards the inside and contributed to product development – which is by nature a bit more clandestine in the early planning stages of a product.

The great news of last week was that we shipped! I'll be getting my first Microsoft "Ship It!" tag for that and we'll have a huge party this Friday night which will surely be a blast.

I've also nominated a batch of 10 people for the MVP title in the "Windows Server System – Connected Systems Developer" competency just before I left for TechEd. We'll know by mid December who of these individuals will make it through the approval process and they'll be MVPs come January. The next nomination cycle is already on and people nominated in that cycle might become MVPs in April 2007. As the timing will likely work out, the people who are MVPs by that quarter will get some very interesting insights into things that we'll only be ready talk about publicly towards the end of 2007.

How can I become an MVP, you ask? There are several ways to get up on our radar (speaking at conferences included), but one sure way is to be very active and helpful in our MSDN Forums: WCF, Workflow, ASMX, Remoting, CardSpace.