David Gardiner - Microsoft

Congratulations 2019-2020 Microsoft MVP!

2019-07-02T15:00:00.000+09:30

I received a really nice email last night:

Great to be a Microsoft MVP for another year!

I first received the Microsoft MVP award in October 2015 (which happens to be about 14 months after I took over organising the Adelaide .NET User Group). Each year since then, I wonder if I'll be renewed. So far, so good.

It's a nice way for Microsoft to show their appreciation for the various things I do for the developer community - running the user group, speaking, and lots of open source contributions. It's also been a great avenue for meeting new people, visiting new places and also providing feedback direct to Microsoft's product teams.

It's also something I'd love more people being recognised for (especially in Adelaide). If you are doing things in the development or IT community (or know someone who is), then let me know in the comments - I'd love to nominate them.

*[MVP]: Most Valuable Professional

2018-2019 Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) award

2018-07-02T21:17:00.000+09:30

I first received Microsoft's MVP award in October 2015. My most recent renewal just occurred on July 1st (aka the early hours of July 2nd here in Adelaide), which was a really nice way to start the week. My 4th consecutive year of being an MVP.

To quote the confirmation email, it was given "in recognition of your exceptional technical community leadership. We appreciate your outstanding contributions in the following technical communities during the past year: Visual Studio and Development Technologies"

For me, that's leading the Adelaide .NET User Group, occasional blogging here, speaking at user groups (and the odd conference) and open source contributions. I like to think that the things I do that have been recognised are things that I would be trying to do in any case.

It isn't something I take for granted. A number of MVPs I know didn't make the cut this year - and it's always a bit of a mystery why some continue and some don't.

I'm also aware that should my own (or Microsoft's) priorities change in the future, then it may no longer be for me. But for now, I really appreciate receiving the award and hope I can make the most of the opportunities it gives me.

MVP Summit 2016

2016-11-13T22:46:00.001+10:30

I’ve just returned from my second Microsoft MVP Summit held in Bellevue and Redmond, Washington (just outside Seattle). I had an awesome time!

I flew over on Saturday going via Brisbane and Vancouver. It was drizzly in Seattle when I arrived (not uncommon I know), but not so wet that I couldn’t spend a bit of time walking around downtown, getting a few souvenirs for the family and generally trying to stay awake as long as I could with the plan to try and go to sleep at right time. That wasn’t easy!

I’d stayed in Seattle the first night, but the summit was over at Bellevue and at Microsoft’s Redmond campus, so I caught the bus up there on Sunday.

I stayed at the Bellevue Hyatt, which was very nice (and convenient as that was also where registration and some of the off-campus events were being held).

Sunday afternoon there were some optional “pre-event” workshops that I attended.

Monday through Wednesday, I attended technical sessions hosted by the various Microsoft Product Teams at Redmond Campus. These started at 8am, so I was up bright and early to grab breakfast and jump on the shuttle buses to get from Bellevue to Redmond in time.

One unexpected surprise was to be one of a handful of MVPs to receive a special token of appreciation for contributing to open source projects connected to the .NET Foundation.

I believe some of the technical sessions were recorded with the intention that where they don’t cover NDA content they’ll be published to Channel 9. Also, you should watch out for the Microsoft Connect() event happening this week.

Thursday was a bit different. Still an 8am start, but for my area (Visual Studio and Development Technologies), Jeff Fritz (who had been coordinating the previous three days) organised a day-long hackathon.

I joined the Visual Studio Extensions group and worked on an extension code analyzer, which can check for common mistakes when creating an extension and offer code fixes. The idea for the analyzer came about after getting some advice on another of my extensions the previous night from Mads Kristensen (Microsoft Web Tooling and Visual Studio Extension author extraordinaire) and Justin Clareburt (expat Aussie and Senior Program Manager for Visual Studio Extensibility). You can see my progress on Github. After a little bit more polish, I hope to publish the analyzer to NuGet (and yes, I even spelled it with a ‘z’ 😀 )

Jeff tweeted about one of the other extensions produced at the hackathon, which integrates with the new Surface Dial. Very cool!

During the MVP Summit hackathon, Nico implemented a Visual Studio extension for the Surface Dial as a debugging tool https://t.co/P2NWS77WWH

— Jeff Fritz (@csharpfritz) November 11, 2016

Another highlight was going down to visit the Microsoft Store in the Bellevue shops and trying out the Surface Studio and having snowball fight with their HTC Vive Virtual Reality headset (photo taken by fellow MVP Alan Burchill).

Thursday night I headed home, arriving back Saturday afternoon. There were some tight connections, but staff at both Vancouver and Brisbane were able to ensure I (and my baggage) made my flights. Phew.

Special thanks to RL Solutions for supporting me attending the summit and especially for my family for allowing me to be away for the week.

Jon Galloway on new things in ASP.NET 5 and ASP.NET MVC 6

2015-04-01T16:58:00.001+10:30

We’ve got another “big name international speaker” for ADNUG this month!

Next week, we’re joined by Jon Galloway, a Microsoft Technical Evangelist based in San Diego, California. Jon will be speaking about the new features coming in both ASP.NET 5 and ASP.NET MVC 6. I assume we’ll see the final versions of these around the same time that Visual Studio 2015 ships.

I first came across Jon through his being one of the presenters of the Herding Code podcast (I’ve been listening since 2009). More recently, I’ve watched some of his courses on Microsoft Virtual Academy, seen him appear weekly in the ASP.NET 5 Community Stand-ups and been following him on Twitter. He’s an engaging, knowledgeable, down-to-earth presenter and I’m anticipating it will be a great meeting.

If you’re in Adelaide, then please register and come along on Thursday 9th April at 12 noon, Microsoft Adelaide, Level 12, 147 Pirie St, Adelaide. Register via http://www.meetup.com/Adelaide-dotNET/events/221073867/

If you’re out of town or just can’t make it in person, then we’ll be running the session via a Google Hangout – so you can still participate in the live session or watch the recording after the event on YouTube.

Look forward to seeing you there in person or online 😀.

MSDN Library for VS SP1 (April 2007 Edition)

2007-03-30T09:40:00.001+09:30

Here's the April 2007 update for the MSDN Library - all 2.2Gigs worth!

Expression June 2006 CTPs

2006-07-04T16:22:00.000+09:30

Microsoft Expression Interactive Designer June 2006 CTP - "used to create engaging, rich user interfaces for desktop and Web applications"
Microsoft Expression Graphic Designer June 2006 CTP - "best of vector-based and pixel-based capabilities, letting you explore new creative and cutting-edge possibilities"

Australian Daylight Savings Changes for Microsoft Products for the Year 2006

2005-12-06T10:33:00.000+10:30

An extra week of daylight savings next year - Australian Daylight Savings Changes for Microsoft Products for the Year 2006

Download details: Shared Computer Toolkit

2005-06-28T09:40:00.000+09:30

Download details: Shared Computer Toolkit: "Microsoft Shared Computer Toolkit for Windows XP (Beta) Powerful new software tools for shared computers in classrooms, school computer labs, libraries, and public places. The Microsoft Shared Computer Toolkit for Windows XP helps make it easy for anyone to set up, safeguard and manage reliable shared computers."

Windows x64 demo in Adelaide

2005-05-03T10:45:00.000+09:30

Microsoft Events (Broken link, was originally www.local.microsoft.com.au/australia/events/register/home.aspx?levent=386373&linvitation=) Mario D’Silva will be presenting this month on Windows x64 Edition and how you can use it to scale up workloads. He will be demonstrating the x64 platform version and covering off common questions and answers with respect to this platform including:

Will this improve Terminal Services?
What applications benefit from it?
Different editions of x64 platform
Hardware Support

Best Practices for Using the Windows Media Screen Codec

2005-03-09T15:38:00.000+10:30

This paper describes the benefits of using the Windows Media Screen codec to capture screen content, highlights some common usage scenarios, and offers best-practice recommendations for enhancing the appearance and behavior of the screen content that you capture.