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