2007 is only 15 days anymore, so 95% of the year is finished.
Time for me to an overview of the year that has brought me to America, that brought me Visual Studio 2008 and a lot of other joyous and sometimes less less joyous moments.
The first months...
Traditionally, January and February are the slowest months of the year. However, I can remember working several nights on the MSDN Belux gadget, a project given to me by the late David Boschmans. The gadget is live in the meantime, you can download it on the MSDN.be site.
This year, I was hit with a serious flu. After visiting the Beauty and the Beast musical in Antwerp, I first got a serious cold, followed by the flu... In total, I had to stay at home for little over 4 weeks, which almost drove me nuts. Luckily, when I got well again, I was very well taken care of by my colleagues at the indi project over at Porthus. On a sidenote, later this year, this project was cancelled due to the fact that Telenet bought indi. I was also working on the CVWarehouse.com project at Ordina Lummen. This project was launched recently and can now be seen at www.cvwarehouse.com.
What happens in Vegas, stays...
Somewhere at the end of April, I got a phone call from my team manager, Gerry Appeltants, with a "small" surprise. I got the chance to visit Mix'07 in Las Vegas. Oh my...! What a nice surprise that was. I had even never taken a plane before and all of a sudden, I was going to the other side of the world. Now, when I look back at that week, I must say, it was one of the best weeks I ever had in my life so far. More info on my trip can be found here.
Who would have known then that I would be flying even more in this great year... Thanks to some people's effort (and I will not name them...) , I was selected for the Ask The Experts booth at TechEd 2007 in Barcelona in November. Again, a great week: I got to know a lot of interesting people and came home with a lot of extra knowledge. On top of that, after landing, I immediately drove (with Sven Cipido) to Euro Disney, where Ordina was having their annual weekend-off. A very "christmassy" experience, as it was cold and snowing gently. What a week that was...
Work? Yes sir.
Everybody who knows me, will tell you that I take work quite seriously 
. So I should of course devote some lines on the most pleasant (and less pleasant) things that happened in my career this year.
I got to work on some great projects: CVWarehouse.com, digital TV with indi... Since Sharepoint became more popular than ever before, I took a course on it at U2U. Sadly, Sharepoint still isn't my cup of tea, so I'll leave it to those more dedicated to it!
Since the half of October, I'm a "v-" at Microsoft Belgium. I'm doing all kinds of interesting things over at the offices in Diegem, which is a great experience! Last week, I got to go to JavaPolis with the Microsoft team to give an example.
(Community) work
I've had a very active community year. I gave a lot of presentations, mostly on Silverlight. In the past months, I did 2 technical sessions on Silverlight and one MSDN evening in Mechelen for over 160 people. My first article appeared in the .net magazine and soon my first webcast will be online at MSDN Chopsticks. More will follow in the very near future.
In June, together with Visug, we organised Community Day, the first Belgian day for developers, completely organized by user groups. As it was a big success, a second installment will happen for user!
I also opened my second blog, www.codeflakes.net which will be more active next year, I promise! Meanwhile, Snowball.be received more users and is now steady at around 800 visitors a day.
The person behind this blog
Personally, I had a great year too. I've been together for over 2 years now with my Lindsey. In 2008, she'll be finishing her studies, which we will be celebrating next year of course!
My health? Well, I've had some troubles, but nothing really bad... Let's hope that will remain the same in the upcoming year!
Remembering a friend
Not everything can be good in 2007... In Vegas, I really got to know David Boschmans. I still remember having drinks late one night at the bar at Caesar's Palace. David was back at work since the end of January, and everything appeared to be going very well with his health.
However, at the end of June, at the Microsoft VIP weekend, he wasn't there all of a sudden.
When I was taking the course mentioned before, Serge Luca told me he had heard David passed away that morning... A sad day for all the people he had known came upon us...
In conclusion
Well, it's almost Christmas, the tree is twinkling nicely here beside me... The (almost) passed year can of course only be what it was because of the help of some great people that I can easily call friends. A sincere thank you is in order.
I can only hope you had a good year too, and will have some great Christmas experiences in the upcoming days. Let's all hope next year brings more great surprises! Hope to see you all here again!
Gill Cleeren
www.snowball.be