Tag: MVP

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Week 5 SDN Cast News with Colin Dembovsky on ALM

SDNCast 38

Another English spoken SDN Cast, this time Colin Dembovsky is our guest and we speak about ALM, Application Lifecycle Management. Colin helps others companies with his firm to get their heads around things like Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) where a full development line is automated from start to finish. This asks for a mind shift and powerful adjustments within most companies. We discuss the impact and responses from these companies and how they handle things like that.

It can’t be a coincidence that Colin -like Fanie- also has an South African background. Right now Colin is based and working as Senior ALM Developer for Northwest Cadence in Seattle and was awarded with the Microsoft MVP Award for his expertise on ALM.

Links to Colin:
https://mvp.microsoft.com/en-us/PublicProfile/4034924?fullName=Colin%20%20Dembovsky
http://www.colinsalmcorner.com/about#
https://twitter.com/colindembovsky

Last week we released some more videos on the dotNed event dotNedSaturday and added them all in one compiled playlist. The interviews are in general Dutch, but the impression video does not contain any languages so that can be viewed by anyone.

dotNedSaturday Impression video:
https://youtu.be/YNqP36H4O_I

Full dotNedSaturday Playlist:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLC5P51a_60YG8xjivMnQE9QpJtM_Fk3_D

Where can you find SDN Cast 38?
https://youtu.be/05GtU8r-m0k

Subscribe to our YouTube channel so you won’t miss a single episode. Usually we are broadcasting live on Thursday evening 8PM GMT+1 in the winter but it might change depending on how things go that week. If you want to be sure you better subscribe to our channel on YouTube or go to http://www.sdncast.nl to discover when our next show will be planned. It will show you when the next show is starting.

News of the week

NDepend v2017 has been released
http://www.ndepend.com/ndepend-v2017
https://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/On-NET/Patrick-Smacchia-ndepend

Get a sneak peek at Android Nougat 7.1.2
https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2017/01/get-sneak-peek-at-android-nougat-712.html

Windows 10 Cloud SKU?
https://www.petri.com/windows-10-cloud-sku-shows-latest-insider-builds

The .NET Language Strategy
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dotnet/2017/02/01/the-net-language-strategy/

VS Team Services Update – Jan 25
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/bharry/2017/01/26/vs-team-services-update-jan-25/

Continuing the evolution of the Microsoft MVP Award!
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/stevengu/2017/02/01/continuing-the-evolution-of-the-mvp-award/

Samsung releases second preview of Visual Studio Tools for Tizen
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/visualstudio/2017/02/01/samsung-releases-second-preview-of-visual-studio-tools-for-tizen/

Update to Visual Studio 2017 Release Candidate
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/visualstudio/2017/01/27/update-to-visual-studio-2017-release-candidate/

Updates to Web Tools in Visual Studio 2017 RC
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/webdev/2017/01/27/updates-to-web-tools-in-visual-studio-2017-rc/

Debugging .NET Core on Unix over SSH
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/visualstudioalm/2017/01/26/debugging-net-core-on-unix-over-ssh/

`yield` keyword to become `co_yield` in VS 2017
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/vcblog/2017/01/27/yield-keyword-to-become-co_yield-in-vs-2017/

Round Launcher Icons in Android 7.1
https://blog.xamarin.com/round-launcher-icons-in-android-7-1/Events

Events this week

Workshop – Building ASP.NET apps on Google Cloud Platform – February 1, Amsterdam
https://www.meetup.com/Software-Circus/events/236840180/

Events Next Week

Code & Comedy – February 8 – Nieuwegein
http://CodeAndComedy.nl

NAV Event, February 8, 2017, Nuland
http://www.dutchdynamics.net/events/nav-event-8-februari-2017

Upcoming events

SDN Event 1 – Zeist – March 17, 2017
www.sdn.nl

Microsoft Tech Summit – Amsterdam, March 23-24, 2017
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/techsummit
https://www.microsoft.com/nl-nl/techsummit/amsterdam.aspx

Build – May 10-12, 2017 – Seattle
http://build.microsoft.com

Techorama – May 22-24, 2017 – Antwerpen, Belgium
http://techorama.be/

NDC Oslo – June 12-16 2017 – Oslo
http://ndcoslo.com

SDN Event 2 – Zeist – June 23, 2017
www.sdn.nl

Ignite 2017 – September 25-29 – Orlando
https://ignite.microsoft.com

SDN Event 3 – Zeist – October 6
www.sdn.nl

We hope you like to watch our SDN Casts. We try to keep up with the news in about an hour a week. You hear what is new and get fun demos on technology and Software Development that you can use in your daily job.

Don’t forget to Subscribe to our channel as we can get a better URL to remember our channel if we reach the number of subscribers needed to add this and make your and our lives a bit easier! And if you haven’t heard if you are the number 100 Subscriber you get something in return! Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3oE_YPB4AJVQSInC-yy3pw?sub_confirmation=1

Go to the website and check when our next broadcast will be!
http://www.sdncast.nl.

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Another year, another MVP Award

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The first of January I was (again) awarded  MVP, for the 12th year already. After a bit of a roundtrip I returned back on my ‘home base’ with the award category of “Office Development”. Initially I was awarded MVP “Visual Studio Tools for the Office System” (I know, what is in a name?) in 2006 and was able to hold on to that for nine years. VSTO however went on maintenance mode and the category was merged into the .NET and Office365 expertises. I work with both, a lot, but was sitting somewhat closer to the Office Team and was moved into the Office365 award category the year after.

Due to complete reorganizations within the MVP Program Group the year after moving to Office365 the category moved again! This time the category was part of an even larger group, Office Servers and Services. VSTO was really a small group of about twenty MVPs, maybe less, Office 365 was huge and Office Servers and Services was bigger than huge. Office development was somehow lost in transition and Microsoft also realized there was a gap in that area and introduced the new Office Development award category and I was happy to find out that I returned ‘home’ by receiving MVP award number twelve in the Office Development category.

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Even after so many years of Office Development, there are still exciting things going on with the Office developer platform. Office JS is getting more and more mature over time and the team is really working hard to get the interfaces in par with what was there on the Windows platform in order to be able to run all equally on all platforms such as iOS, Android but obviously also on Windows.

Let’s see what 2017 brings on Office Development, Stay tuned and thanks all for giving me the 12th MVP Award!

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Happy wishes and some Office predictions for 2016

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Another year has gone, a new year started … this is 2016. Welcome!

My year, for the eleventh time already, started with receiving the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) Award again.

After nine years of receiving the award for Visual Studio Tools for the Office System (VSTO), one year of Office365 I now, after the award update, received the award in the award category “Office Servers and Services”. This is where all former Office365, Exchange, SharePoint, Skype for Business and Yammer are grouped today. As of October 2015 the MVP Award categories have changed, there are now less categories and in theory you can get the MVP Award in multiple categories.

So what will bring 2016 to you and me? Well nobody knows… so I don’t know either, but let’s see if we can make some educated guesses here.

2015 was the year Office Microsoft released some early updates on the Office 365 APIs. Starting with the outer ring of Office365 we got access to files, contacts and much more. Access to the documents itself (the structure of the document, in VBA the Object Model) was fairly limited.

In 2016 I expect to see much more APIs providing access to the Office document model. This will give you the functionality, but now cross-platform, like you used to see with VBA, COM-Addins and in VSTA/VSTO solutions.

Let’s see how the Office365 APIs progresses in the year of 2016. Join me in the process of learning the ‘modern’ ways of developing Office solutions on x-plat. Keep an eye on my blog …

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A new year with new opportunities

2014

2014 Is almost in its second week now and already I am so busy doing things, work related but also in my personal space, that I didn’t get to even write an opening blog post for 2014 up to now. And that has to change. 2013 has been a rollercoaster of events where I allowed myself to get only a couple of hours of sleep each day to get things at least going in the right direction (except my work-life balance of course).

Some of the 2013 event highlights:

  • Re-awarded Microsoft MVP for VSTO for 2013
  • Two (!) MVP Global Summits
  • Spent a month in Orlando, Florida
  • Build 2013 Conference
  • At work moved thousands, all of the NL firm, laptops from Windows 7/Office 2010 to Windows 8/Office 2013

Especially the last item kicked in hard. Moving from Office 2010 to Office 2013 wasn’t (and still isn’t) a smooth ride. One of our biggest projects was depending on XMLNode structures in Office but that feature was all the sudden removed from Office due to a lost legal issue between Microsoft and a third party from Canada. As this happened we were now forced to do a complete rewrite of our code to get around this.

What’s up for 2014?

Of course the air hasn’t completely cleared yet from the fireworks smoke, so obviously not all that will happen in 2014 is known or pre-announced, always the element of surprise – that’s life, but here are some things to be expected for 2014:

  • Re-awarded Microsoft MVP for VSTO for 2014
    Already happened, I received a message from Microsoft congratulating me with the 2014 MVP Award!
  • MVP Global Summit (I think only one this year…)
  • Build 2014 Conference
  • Still a lot to do at work projects, getting feature complete and extend, add new features on the new platform
  • Move most of my home servers into the cloud
    I still have a lot of servers running at home giving me headaches for either the management of all servers (they always tend to break when I’m traveling) or the energy bills from the utility services so it is about time to move it all to Windows Azure if possible.
  • Try to act a bit more healthy
    In 2013 I started, supported by the FitBit Flex, to walk a daily amount of 10K steps. That was a good start, I still do that every day and lost about 11 kilos (24lbs) in weight. There is however the issue of not getting enough sleep! Hopefully there is somewhat less pressure on our projects to get closer to about 8 hours of sleep a day.
  • Roslyn integration in Visual Studio?
    We’ve seen the first signs from Roslyn for VB.NET and C# in public presentations at the end of 2013. Will 2014 be the big year for Roslyn to be deployed to general public?
  • Visual Studio 2014?
  • SDN Events and Magazines
    Also for the Dutch Software Development Network another year of events and magazines we want to hand to the developer community. Always looking for new articles and presentations so if you want to share, let me know!
  • Learn! Always continue to learn something new, if you stop learning you stop living. Some great resources: WintellectNow, PluralSight, Channel 9, Microsoft Virtual Academy and many more!

Showtime

As a reminder for my own benefit, but hopefully also interesting enough for others to read I want to add to each blog post a small section on movies I’ve seen at the time of writing the blog post.

Captain Phillips

Captain Phillips
In 2014 our local cinema introduced for the first time a fixed subscription to visit the movies for a monthly price. A so called all you can watch subscription that I have been bugging them for for years so I had to jump in once the opportunity arrived.

The first movie that I did go to with my new ‘Platinum Pas’ was Captain Phillips. A movie about the true story of Captain Phillips (Tom Hanks) about the 2009 hijacking of his cargo ship while crossing international waters next to Africa by a couple of Somali pirates.

The movie is an absolute thriller and while ‘under the command’ of the Somali pirates there was no way to expect what these guys had in mind with the US crew and/or with the cargo ship. With help of the US Navy they tried to get the ship back and get away from the African risk areas.

Besides being a thrilling movie there also was this excellent part in the movie that was showing the human side of the event, eventually finishing in the emotional breakdown of Captain Phillips releasing all his emotions that he so far kept for himself. Usually these movies stop after being released from the bad guys but this one did continue for another twenty minutes to ‘get it all in the open’. Nine points out of Ten.

Give feedback!

If I haven’t told you before, let me know what you think! If you think things are completely off – different – or have another opinion? Sure, always an option… write it in the comments and get a discussion started. It’s a free world (at least I tend to think so) so let me hear from you all!