Snowball - The Blog

Today, I got the confirmation that I am now a member of the Ineta Speaker Bureau Europe. (http://europe.ineta.org/).
The INETA Europe Speaker Bureau provides usergroup leaders top notch speakers for their key events. The speakers are provided at no cost to the usergroup.

That means that if you run a usergroup, you can now request me at no cost to come speak at your events!

A nice little touch is that together with myself, my collegue and friend Kurt Claeys was also added to the bureau! Congrats!

Just minutes ago, I got the confirmation that I'm awarded MVP again for the second year in ASP.NET/Visual web developer category.

I hope to make the award again this year as useful as in 2008 by making many contributions for the community in Belgium (and hopefully outside Belgium also).

Next week, I'll be in the US again (second time already), attending the MVP/RD Summit in Seattle and Redmond.

We'll be visiting the Redmond campus, get a lot of info of which we aren't allowed to speak/blog yet and I'm sure I'll be meeting a lot of interesting people. Scott Guthrie, Steve Ballmer and Scott Hanselman will be among the speakers, so we are in for a treat!

I'm leaving on Sunday, flying with KLM from Schiphol and we'll arrive in Seattle at app. 2pm. The actual event doesn't start until Monday, so I have some time to do some shopping. We are staying at the Sheraton Hotel, right in the center of the town and close to the shopping malls.

On Tuesday and Wednesday, we'll be at the Microsoft Campus in Redmond. I'm really anxious to see the campus and the way everything works up there.

Thursday will be the closing of the event with Steve Ballmer. Friday morning, I'm leaving Seattle and will be returning to Belgium.

I have my laptop with me, so whenever possible, I'll be blogging about the event!

2008 just started, and I already got some great news from Microsoft: I was given the 2008 Microsoft MVP award! I must admit I made a little jump when I saw the mail in my Outlook Web Access this evening.

If you've never heard of the MVP award yet, here's a little aid: it is an honor given to you by Microsoft based on community activity. Writing articles, being active in user groups, blogging, giving presentations... that sort of things.

Here's a little piece of the mail I can show you:

Dear Gill Cleeren, 

Congratulations! We are pleased to present you with the 2008 Microsoft® MVP Award!  The MVP Award is our way of saying thank you for promoting the spirit of community and enhancing people’s lives and the industry’s success every day.  Your extraordinary efforts in Visual Developer - ASP/ASP.NET technical communities during the past year are greatly appreciated.

I do want to thank the people that made this possible. 2007 was a great year, that brought me in contact with so many new things (as you can read in my 2007 year review). As 2008 is only 1 day of age, I must say it started pretty darn good already!

Of course, I intend to do whatever is necessary to honor my new title. I'll try to be even more helpful for the community in 2008. I'll give my very best, even try 200%!

Thanks Microsoft!