With the count down clock at T-10 days to my sabbatical trip an email popped into my mail box… it was an email from Microsoft congratulating me on getting the MVP (Most Valuable Professional) award for my work with Team System!

What is this MVP Award?

The Microsoft MVP Award is an annual award that recognizes exceptional technology community leaders worldwide who actively share their high quality, real world expertise with users and Microsoft… With fewer than 5,000 awardees worldwide, Microsoft MVPs represent a highly select group of experts. MVPs share a deep commitment to community and a willingness to help others. They represent the diversity of today’s technical communities. MVPs are present in over 90 countries, spanning more than 30 languages, and over 90 Microsoft technologies. MVPs share a passion for technology, a willingness to help others, and a commitment to community. These are the qualities that make MVPs exceptional community leaders. MVPs’ efforts enhance people’s lives and contribute to our industry’s success in many ways. By sharing their knowledge and experiences, and providing objective feedback, they help people solve problems and discover new capabilities every day. MVPs are technology’s best and brightest…

Richard Kaplin, Microsoft Corporate Vice President

So this is a great honour for me to be welcomed into a group of people who I look up to and respect :)  You can see my new MVP profile up at https://mvp.support.microsoft.com/profile/Robert.MacLean

Over the last year I have done a number of presentations and recently some of uploaded them (unfortunately I cannot upload all, as some contain NDA information) to SlideShare so here is the collection of presentations from the last 15 months or so, in no particular order:

• ASP.NET Dynamic Data
• JSON and REST
• What’s Microsoft CRM all about?
• Source Control 101
• SQL Server Integration Services
• ASP.NET MVC
• What’s new in the .NET Framework 3.5 SP 1

Click the read more link to see and download them...

ASP.NET Dynamic Data

 

JSON and REST

 

 

What’s Microsoft CRM all about?

Source Control 101

SQL Server Integration Services

 

 

ASP.NET MVC

 

 

What’s new in the .NET Framework 3.5 SP 1

This morning I got up for a quick cycle and as I road up the last big hill before I got home the sun really started to beat down on me and the swet changed from cooling moist to dripping. This is all at 6am, which is normal for a South African summer day, in fact our winters, in Johannesburg, aren’t too bad too. It normally is around single digits in winter at night and the days go up to 14 or so degrees. I guess that is why Willy-Peter decided to send me this picture – it’s a warning that better go shopping for a jacket or nine.

In 40 days I will be starting a very exciting adventure, that being flying to Canada and America for 3 weeks of what is being referred to as the Rangers Sabbatical. The what? you may be asking yourself, I have posted previously on my Microsoft VSTS Rangers project involvement. Well in January I will be heading to hang out with with Willy-Peter Schaub at the MCDC (Microsoft Canada Development Centre) in Vancouver Canada and then Chuck Sterling at Microsoft Corp HQ in Redmond, USA.

I am hoping to be able to blog a lot about this trip, although I doubt that I will be allowed to share photo’s of that central server that Microsoft runs that all traffic on the internet run though which is built on Linux (that is a joke for those with humour issues), since this will be the first time I will be going to north America and so this is really going to be an exciting adventure.

I was answering a question on World Cup 2010 Dizcus and found an amazing feature on Google Maps. I was looking for maps of cities in SA, and I stumbled across this cool more info link.

More info takes you to a portal for the city with information on the time & timezone, a high view map of the area, photos and videos of the town, popular places and related maps. This is a great resource when you are looking for information on a city that you have never been too! Below is a screen shot from my home town of Johannesburg.

Well today is the day! Dev4Dev’s is happening at Microsoft this morning and I will be speaking on 10 12 new features in the Visual Studio 2010 IDE. For anyone wanting the slide deck and demo application I used you can grab them below.

The slide deck is more than the 6 visible slides, there is in fact 19 slides which cover the various demos and have more information on them so you too can present this to family and friends :)

The Nokia 5800 I have runs on the Symbian S60 5th Edition operating system and it seems to be a decent OS, but built into it is the most interesting anti-piracy system I have seen. So how does it work? Note: I am not an expert in this, this is my view after a few weeks looking into it, so I may be wrong.

First every application needs to specify what features it uses and based on that it can either be flagged into one of three categories:

• Unprotected
• Protected
• Testing

Testing has no security, and is just good for testing. However for the other two, they must be signed with a SSL certificate. For unprotected applications you can self sign, in other words using the certificate on the phone to sign the application. For protected you’ll need a certificate from a certificate signing website - which there are just a few of and these sites also require you to signup as a publisher which costs $200. So once you pay $200 and you go through the process you can sign an application however it is locked to the IMEI of the phone. This means that the application can only ever be run on a specific phone.

Now the security model falls over, if you go out and get the publisher details since you could take other peoples applications and strip out the existing certificate and sign it with your own, but that costs $200 (and you are logging with a central company what software you are signing, so that they may be able to track it). Why I think this works is because almost every single application out there is much cheaper than $200. In fact for $200 you can get so many apps legally that I question who would pay $200 if they were not a legitimate publisher.

I think this process is much better than the iPhone’s app store - since you do not need to get a companies permission to sell the software. You can build it, host it anywhere and viola it is available.

A similar process is available in Windows Vista+ x64 for drivers, which must be also signed in a similar process. I am wondering if this should not occur for all applications in Windows as well - however there are a lot of changes that would need to be implemented.

If you do not live in South Africa, you cannot imagine the excitement what next years soccer world cup is generating. In my view it will be one of the top defining moments for South Africa, up there with the ‘94 elections and '’95 Rugby World Cup. To that end I have been doing my little bit as a local to help out people with sharing knowledge on all things world cup at the Dizcus World Cup website.

If you know StackOverflow/ServerFault/SuperUser then this site follows the same design as them except focused on a non-computer topic. For the rest of you readers, it is just an easy to use website where people post questions and others answer. If you successfully answer a question or answer a question very well you get points.

So Mathew, the site owner, put up a challenge about a month ago where he said the top 5 people, based on points, would get a South African Soccer Jersey! Well I was in the top 5 (I think number 2) and so I got the email today saying I had won a jersey! Thanks Mathew for the jersey and the great website!

In the last few weeks I got a Nokia 5800 XpressMusic phone which has been brilliant, and as the geek I am I have been playing around and trying out many of the functions on it. One area which has been an absolute fail, has been the GPS software: Nokia Maps. The phone comes with a  6 month license to get directions or have the phone speak to you as you drive, but at the end of the 6 months you need to pay for these premium services :(

I have no problem paying for it, but the costing model is retarded. This is the pricing when you select it from within the phone:

• 1 day costs R19.99
• 30 days costs R20.00
• 30 days with automatic renewal costs R66
• 1 year costs R512.99

Now I cannot imagine what person would choose 1 day, when 30 days is 1c more expensive, however the part that confuses me is that it is over three times more expensive for the same 30 days with the exception that you are telling Nokia you want to keep up to date with it. The year part is also odd, since if you purchase each month separately it is R240 which is less than half of the year subscription!

All of this screams that Nokia South Africa has ZERO clue about what they are doing to promote people to

• Buy in bulk or put another way: Pay more
• Setup a “contract” which will cause people to pay more

In fact it seems they, Nokia South Africa don’t want the business - because you can also purchase this using your browser online from Nokia Europe, which is a little more work than on your phone, but their pricing makes sense (see how it makes sense to buy the bigger packages or renewal options):

• 1 day costs €1,59 (in rands that is roughly R17.90 or 10% cheaper)
• 30 days costs €5,99 (in rands that is roughly R67.45 or 237% more expensive)
• 30 days with automatic renewal costs €5,19 (in rands that is roughly R58.44 or 11% cheaper)
• 1 year costs €39,99 (in rands that is roughly R450.33 or 12% cheaper)

When my subscription ends I will be sending money out of the country and helping Europe make their sales targets which just feels wrong :(

I have been very focused during the day on a project and my evenings have been taken up a lot with VSTS Rangers work so the blog has lagged a bit so here are some things you should be aware of (if you follow me on Twitter, then you probably have heard these in 140 characters or less):

I was awarded the title of VSTS Rangers Champion - this is a great honour since it is a peer vote from VSTS External Rangers (no Microsoft Staff) and MVP’s for involvement in the VSTS Rangers projects.

The VSTS Rangers shipped the alpha of the integration platform for TFS 2010 - this is important for me because it means some of the bits I have worked on are now public and I am expecting some feedback to get them better for beta and release next year. It is also important since my big contribution to the integration platform, which is an adapter I will cover in future blog posts, has a fairly stable base.

Dev4Dev’s in coming up in just over a week. This is one of my favourite events because it really is event for passionate developers since they have to give up a Saturday morning for it (no using an event to sneak off work). I will be presenting on Visual Studio 2010! Which should be great, based on my first dry run to an internal audience at BB&D last week. Two more of my BB&D team mates will be presenting Zayd Kara on TFS Basic and (if memory serves me) Rudi Grobler on Sketchflow!

The Information Worker user group is really blowing my mind with it’s growth, on Tuesday we had 74 people attend our meeting. For a community that only had a 100 or so people signed up on the website at the beginning of the year that is brilliant. Thanks must go to my fellow leads: Veronique, Michael, Marc, Zlatan, Hilton and Daniel. We will be having a final Jo’burg event for the year on the 2nd and it will be a fun ask the experts session.