The Endless journey of learning and technical improvement continues, And this July I have once again been bestowed with the Microsoft MVP Award, for the .NET Expertise.

“But wait a minute” you say, The other times you mentioned it, you received an award for ‘Visual C#’

Ahh- yes indeed! My previous awards say “Visual C#” however, my new one will say “.NET”. My expertise specifically has not changed, however it was decided within the program (and I agree that it sounded reasonable) to merge the various .NET expertises (Visual C#, Visual Basic, F#, etc.) into one expertise, because there was so much overlap.

This is actually quite an interesting change, and I may consider doing some more things with F# and VB.NET. I was considering, since my main VB experience has been with VB6, taking a look at the differences that have occurred in the intervening years more closely. There are quite a lot of posts/articles written on that topic but they all do so with a rather negative slant towards VB.NET for a number of reasons.

Like all previous years- especially when I was first nominated, and subsequently awarded, in 2012, it always takes me by surprise. One of the important things I think is to never expect to be re-awarded. Instead, I try to write code-intensive posts as often as possible to “re-earn” it each year. And when (inevitably at some point) I don’t get re-awarded, I will continue to post the same content that got me awarded to begin with as much as possible.

Speaking of, one thing I’ve found lately is that I can’t really adapt a lot of the work I am doing to something that can be anonymized and posted as a blog post. I think I might have already written about that, in fact. However some stuff on the horizon may involve adapting my existing Product Key code to work in a distributed environment- such that for example there would be a “license server” that would be able to effectively “audit” our own customers to make sure they don’t run more than the licensed number of installs of our software. I’m sure that will be an interesting challenge for the future and intend to at least do some investigation into the concept by making adjustments to my own version which would of course be made available here.