Today is Microsoft MVP day, when emails go out to the new and renewed MVPs. After two years being an ASP.NET MVP, my name is no longer on that list.
Since making a few tweets, and having some fun with my busted Zune HD (it was already busted, I didn’t take out any rage upon the poor music player) I’ve received emails, IMs, and DMs asking if it was a joke, was it real, and offering to nominate me back in to the list.
This post is to explain why I don’t qualify for MVP, and why I’m not looking to change that. This isn’t a rant on Microsoft, the MVP program, or turtles. (Blue turtle shells however, can kiss my ass.)
Microsoft awards and MVP to someone who is involved in the developer community and focusing on a Microsoft product. That last part is key to understanding the MVP program. The selections of MVPs are made by a product team, and they are budgeted a limited number of slots.
The question “why is the guy behind CodeStock not an MVP?” really should be “what does the guy behind CodeStock do for the ASP.NET Product team?”. Remember, if I take a slot someone else is passed over. I cannot say when looking at my community involvement in ASP.NET and even XNA that I do enough a product team would notice.
I’ve also not been focused this past year, speaking on Lucene, Dependancy Injection, WPF, and XNA and also writing the short ebook XNA 3D Primer. I took time off from speaking to focus on CodeStock 2010. None of this really supports ASP.NET. I had said to my MVP lead that I was interested in XNA MVP, but since I’m not interested in Windows Phone 7 XNA I can’t say I’m helping that team much either.
That is another problem I have, I tend to focus on slightly older technologies instead of the cutting edge. I’m not the guy talking about Windows Phone 7, ASP.NET MVC3, SilverLight 4, and Entity Framework. These products all have teams behind them looking for help getting their message out to developers and are better off using their limited MVPs slots on someone else.
I am going to continue to do things in the community I feel are needed. I am looking forward to CodeStock 2011, and working with Knoxna. Very soon the efforts of myself, Dylan, and Cicelie will pay off in launching GameMarx and I hope to raise awareness (and sales) of Xbox Live Indie Games (and the developers behind them).
In short, nothing has changed.
Posted By Mike On Friday, October 01, 2010
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