Microsoft MVP in Connected Systems
Posted by Dan Rigsby on October 2nd, 2008
I was beginning to think it would never happen, but someone took notice out there, and over time my contributions to the community have mounted up to a Microsoft MVP award in Connected Systems for my relentless love of Wcf. It is truly quite an honor. There are a lot of great MVPs out there, and I am not sure I deserve to designated like many of them. However, I want to thank Microsoft and everyone out there in the community for this honor. I had many people helping me along the way and giving me opportunities. I especially want to thank my wife and family though for being flexible with my free time and allowing me to do all that I do outside of work for the community.
The MVP award “is given to exceptional technical community leaders who actively share their high quality, real world expertise with others.” The award is not easy to get and you can’t apply for it. The award is based on your contributions for the past 12 months, and the award is granted for a period of 1 year. After this time you may receive it again based on your contributions for that following 12 months. Some of the rewards associated with it are quite nice such as the MVP Summit in Redmond, MSDN subscription, special downloads and training, etc. The real gift though is being acknowledged for the love and dedication for the technology and community. Most MVPs will probably agree that they do what they do out of a passion for these things, not to get any kind of award.
There is not right or wrong way to get this award. There have been many posts online about what it takes to get noticed. For myself, I can’t tell you exactly what led up to this, but here are some of the highlights of my community involvement in the past year:
- Officer at IndyNDA (~100 attendees per month and over 1500 members)
- Blogging (over 100 posts)
- Wcf Forums (1800+ posts and Moderator)
- 6 Webcasts
- 15 Speaking Engagements across the Midwest
- Always looking for ways to help others embrace and understand Microsoft technologies!
I do these things because I love doing them. Hopefully, I will be honored with this award again in the years to come, but if I don’t, it won’t affect how I feel about what I love to do. Its going to be a very exciting year for .Net developers, and I am very excited to be part closer to the Connected Systems team which we will be hearing more about with Wcf, Oslo, Cloud Services, etc.
One other added bonus is the new title under my name in the MSDN Forums:
Here is a link to my MVP Profile: https://mvp.support.microsoft.com/profile/dan.rigsby
October 2nd, 2008 at 11:05 am
Congrats, Dan! You’re the second person I know who made MVP this round! It’s great to get more recognition in the area. You really deserve it!
October 2nd, 2008 at 11:13 am
Congratulations Dan! This is a well deserved honor, keep up the great work. Hope to meet up with you again sometime.
October 2nd, 2008 at 12:02 pm
Congratulations!
I expect no less than 3 books in print and 2 movie deals from you in the upcoming year
.
October 2nd, 2008 at 2:43 pm
You surely deserve it. See you in LA.
October 2nd, 2008 at 4:21 pm
Congrats Dan!!! You definitely deserve this great honor. I’m just glad we got to hear you speak before you hit the “big time”!
October 3rd, 2008 at 7:15 am
Congrats and well deserved!
Is this kind of like Highlander, where, in order for you to assume the mantle you had to slay an existing MVP in combat? Joking aside – do you know if there’s a finite amount of MVP’s per “group”?
Will.
October 3rd, 2008 at 7:19 am
Congrats, Dan! And thanks for all you have given to the community thus far.
October 3rd, 2008 at 7:56 am
Much of the MVP program is secretive or fuzzy. I dont think there is a hard number for each group, but each MVP runs a cost to the team, so they try to keep the numbers in a certian range. However, if they say they only want 30 and 2 new guys go way above and beyond, they might be flexible to include them.
October 3rd, 2008 at 7:58 am
Hey Christian, Ill look you up in LA. I appreciate the chance to meet industry leaders such as yourself.
October 3rd, 2008 at 12:48 pm
Thanks for the shout out, dear. Now that you are an MVP, does that mean I get to have you back in the evenings? Ha! Congratulations!
October 3rd, 2008 at 4:15 pm
As one of the “Someones” who noticed you, I am very happy that you got the award, and you deserve it as much as any of your MVP Bretheren. Your passion for engaging with the Community is unsurpassed, and your knowledge has helped untold thousands use WCF, so it was really a no-brainer for us to give you the award. I look forward to seeing you at the Summit.
October 4th, 2008 at 12:37 pm
Congratulations Dan!
October 5th, 2008 at 8:13 am
Congrats Dan. You are truly the epitome of a MS MVP.
October 6th, 2008 at 12:20 pm
Congratulations!!!. Very well deserved Dan.
October 8th, 2008 at 5:08 pm
I agree with the multitude… Well Deserved! Congrats!
October 10th, 2008 at 7:08 am
Looks like everyone lost some Recognition Points in the move to the new forum. You’ve been “demoted” to a 4-medal poster and I lost ~80 recognition points.
Doh!
October 10th, 2008 at 9:35 am
I just wanted to post my congratulations. I really need to share my wisdom with the community like you do, I just don’t have that much wisdom to share.