MVP Again… 5 years and counting!

I’ve waited for my MVP badge to arrive before announcing this on my blog: I am an MVP again, for the 5th year in a row!

The novelty of receiving the famous “Congratulations! We are pleased to present you with the 2012 Microsoft® MVP Award! ” email may fade by the fifth time, but the feeling of being honored by the Award, being humbled by the amazing fellow MVPs I can be associated with, and the whole-day grin on my face does not fade at all.

Starting my fifth MVP year feels special. Five years is a lot! My son turned five yesterday, and oh boy, has he changed. So has technology. My first MVP award was in the Client App Development category, mostly for my community work with WPF and generally around User Experience. Then along came Silverlight, and I found myself being in the first wave of Silverlight MVPs, and part of such an amazing group that it makes me incredibly proud and humbled at the same time to be among them – and even call some of them friends.

Last year was a blur (my MVP year is from April to the end of March, with the awards arriving in July). While Silverlight’s best days may be behind it, the spirit lives on. Ever since I heard the first details, I was focused on Windows Phone. I jumped right into it, absorbing the – Silverlight based – development model along with the amazing User Experience it provided. I talked at tons of events about the phone, development, design - including the Hungarian launch of Windows Phone 7, and later the Nokia devices. But the biggest speaker achievement of this last year was that – along with Bálint Orosz, the designer of Cocktail Flow – I could not only go to Mix’11, but also speak there about SurfCube (our Innovation Award winner browser for Windows Phone 7). Over 800 “outsider” talks were submitted, 200 put up to vote, and merely 12 made it to the conference. Wow.

I also got into Kinect. I love the green field UX experiments this amazing piece of technology allows us to perform. To see some of our Kinect work, visit our homepage at www.response.hu. I also got invited to a number of Kinect talks, including a “tour” during the Baltic Tech Days.

All in all, I gave almost 30 talks last year, many of them abroad. Our Silverlight User Group was transformed to a vibrant trend-watching community, vNext.hu, which is the most active vNext group – not bad from a small country of only 10 million people . I also kept blogging here, posted 23 articles about Kinect, Windows Phone and User Experience. But the writing didn’t stop there: I wrote an e-book called Windows Phone book for Silverlight Developers, the performance chapter of the first Hungarian Windows Phone book, and also a chapter for a Wrox book which was later pulled due to scheduling conflicts. And these are just the highlights…

What’s next for this year? I will keep following my passion and interest in technology. That’s the only way to do it. I’ll keep working with Windows Phone 7, while looking forward to Windows Phone 8. Windows 8 will definitely be a big part of my activities, the new tablet form factor and the Metro design language are very exciting. Kinect is also something that I plan to work with and share my thoughts on – both here, on Twitter and also on conferences as a speaker.

Here’s to another five years!