The road to Visual Studio ALM MVP

Yesterday (on the tricky date April 1st) I received an email from Microsoft.

It started with:

“Congratulations! We are pleased to present you with the 2012 Microsoft® MVP Award! This award is given to exceptional technical community leaders who actively share their high quality, real world expertise with others. We appreciate your outstanding contributions in Visual Studio ALM technical communities during the past year.”

Of course I am very happy and proud with this award and I like to thank Delta-N, my colleagues, Microsoft NL and you (the reader) for allowing me to be a MVP.

A little history:

My first experience with Visual Studio Team System (that was how it was called back then) was at the introduction of the 2005 beta version. We were busy at our company (Delta-N) looking at software development lifecycle and optimizing parts of it. These efforts were all focused on the technical side of things.

Besides the fact that I am a technical guy I also really like optimizing processes. It does not matter if this is a technical or functional optimization. When I saw VSTS 2005 I was sold from the first moment on. This technical product that can be used for optimizing process. Best of both world for me.

I dived into the product and rolled it out in our own company. With the expertise I gained here, we started organizing seminars together with Microsoft Netherlands. the efforts and crowd were still very small.

With the introduction of VSTS 2008 the crowd grew. We started organizing free , full day, InTrack seminars around VSTS. In 1 days we showed the most important features to a big crowd of people.

At our company we developed a module around “getting up and running with VSTS 2008”. Our customers base grew…I also started speaking at different events around VSTS and TFS 2008

Then, with the introduction of VS2010 ALM, the growth was incredible. A lot of new customers came to us for consultancy and our company became Microsoft ALM Gold Certified Partner. I started blogging more frequently, answered community questions, and spoke at even more events. Last year we even started a separate Business Unit around our ALM Services.

As you can see a long road and the end is not in sight.

I really look forward to this year with VS/TFS11 coming up and my newly rewarded status.

Thanks everybody for reading!!