Tag: New Year

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A New Beginning (as always)

Soft as in Software is Wishing you a Happy 2024

2024 has started and we are in the second week already. Time for a short recap, as always but like oliebollen, it is part of the tradition. Last year flew by before we knew it. A lot happened but also a lot did not happen.

On a personal level I have been working on my physical state and crazy as it is joined the 5AM club. While travelling to Microsoft Build 2023 I was jet-lagged and was waking up at around four or five AM due to shifted time zones. There is about a nine-hour time difference between my home location and Seattle where Microsoft Build was hosted at the time. I started working out in the gym at the hotel right after waking up and that is still my daily opening scene today.

My physical condition improved a lot, lost a lot of weight (knowing that I also gained a lot of muscle), improved my stamina, lowered my heart rate and extended my sleeping pattern by a few hours.

The downside of more sleep and exercising obviously is that there is not much time left after a day with an extended morning routine, walking to the gym, exercise, walking back from the gym, having breakfast and a shower and morning routine. Add to that a full working day and before you know it, it is time to go to bed again to get the right amount of sleep.

Before all of this I crawled out of bed late, worked for the day and had a long night on Twitch and YouTube to develop stuff online. I was able to crank out a lot of things on my computer but neglected the state of my body and it was already in a bad state after picking up COVID-19. The patterns changed a lot last year but also took a large bite out of my development segment as part of the digital life I was living before.

I still did a lot of things, not as visible as before, ‘off screen’ such as working and supporting my pet project to create Office Add-ins in the context of Blazor. I created the sample projects here in the official Microsoft OfficeDev/Office-Add-in-samples repo as a prototype and helper projects for the community to work on.

I also extended my Azure Developer Associate Certification and was rewarded for the eighteenth time Microsoft MVP again. Completely out of context I did another Transatlantic Disney Cruise to travel from Southampton to New York together with my wife.

Developments on a professional level were a bit disappointing in 2023 and therefore, for 2024, I decided that this will be a time to reflect. At this time working about a day less each week (professionally, that is) whenever possible and focusing more on the fun side of life by working on my own expense on projects that give more joy to see where we end up.

Life is short and therefore it is important to focus on the happy stuff and stay on the positive side in body and mind. There is a lot going on in the world that impacted a lot of innocent people last year. I won’t go too deep into that but apparently there are a few individuals who think it is necessary to spoil the lives of others for their benefit (is there?) and their own position. For 2024, let us all try to turn that around for the better and make sure we all have a safe and prosperous future on this planet. We need to turn the negatives into positive, don’t you agree?

Like last year I have lots of plans on the shelf and I hope you will join me and see you on my YouTube Channel, Twitch Channel or on my Soft as in Software landing pages with this blog!

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Recap 2022 and boot into 2023

Wishing you a happy …

The first week of 2023 is behind us, my ‘holidays’ are over, and it is time to boot up 2023. Officially you are not allowed to wish anyone a “Happy New Year” anymore after January 7th.

In the Netherlands, the holidays are a bit different this year compared to other years. In general, we take the last two weeks of the year off but given how Christmas and New Year ended up on the calendar the two-week holiday disconnect was now set to the last week of 2022 and the first week of 2023 by our government.

2022 has been an ups and down year for me. The Up was definitely the Transatlantic Cruise to celebrate my 25th wedding anniversary sailing from Dover to New York with stops in France, UK, Spain, and Bermuda. An experience I wouldn’t want to have missed for the world. The downside was that after staying away from it for over two years I finally got hit by COVID-19, most likely picked it up on our return trip flying back from New York to Berlin or on the train from Berlin to Amsterdam, where we ran into huge crowds all coughing and sneezing while travelling home using airplanes and trains.

Although COVID-19 did not hit me very hard, a mild flu without too much fever, the coughing didn’t go away and kept going on a low level. Just before X-mas, however, I adopted a heavy flu infection. I guess I was still somewhat vulnerable to not being completely recovered from COVID. This resulted in a Pneumonia and my body didn’t allow me to do anything beyond having a time-out. My ‘Body Battery’ didn’t even climb up on my Garmin and zero-ed out for a lengthy period.

Time to visit the doctor (last time was about 10 years ago, I am -knock on wood- not much of a doctor visitor). The examination by my doctor resulted in a huge pile of medication with powerful types that started to kick in the moment I took them in. It looks like things are changing for the better now, at least my ‘Body Battery’ is showing upward movements again.

From a Soft as in Software perspective 2022 was not bad, until my health went south that is. In 2022 I created Office Add-in Starter projects to have new fresh Office Developers to easily get started building their first Word, Excel or Outlook Add-ins using Office JavaScript APIs. Also, I was able to build Blazor based Office Add-ins allowing you to use more .NET based coding, still allowing you to interact with Office hosts such as Word, Excel, or Outlook.

I pushed all of my Office Add-in demo repos into the official Microsoft OfficeDev/Office-Add-in-samples repo by creating Pull Requests and even did some small presentations on the Microsoft Office Add-ins Community calls.

Here are the links to the Add-ins and presentations:

Look at the above links and try to build some of your own Office Add-ins and let me know what you like or don’t like about it. I think the option to use Blazor in your Office Add-ins can be a powerful help if you are a .NET developer from origin and should make it easier to hook into Office, maybe allowing you to move your VSTO Office Add-ins into Office JS Add-ins.

So, there is my New Year’s rant … let’s focus on the future and see where we are going. For one thing my body just warned and gave a clear message to put your health at number one.

I still have lots of plans though so keep an eye out and hope to see you on my YouTube Channel, Twitch Channel or on my Soft as in Software landing pages with this blog!

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Start With a Bang

Happy New Year!

We left behind 2021, our second year covered with Covid, and moved into 2022. Just when I was about to close the year, traditionally baking a huge batch of “Oliebollen”, “Appelflappen” and “Ananasflappen” (Google it if you don’t know what they are), I received an email from Twitch Corp telling me that I leveled up to Twitch Affiliate.

Twitch Affiliate

If you look at the specs it doesn’t feel like a massive thing:

– Reach fifty followers
– Stream for eight hours
– Stream on seven different days
– Average of three viewers

… but it is harder than you think.

The requirements span is within a 30-day timeframe. The “Stream for eight hours” and ” Stream on seven different days” are the easy ones although reserving seven days out of thirty to do live streaming is already hard to reach for most but it is something you simply can set your mind to and do it without the help of the community. It means streaming twice a week for over an hour to get the eight hours and seven instances in place.

With a niche subject (Live Coding is already a niche subject on its own on Twitch) such as Office Development, coding in general, it is extra hard to get someone’s attention on Twitch. Twitch is more focused on gaming where streamers are sharing their gameplay on stream.

Twitch is not actively pushing content under the noses of people, so you must build your own attention to your channel. Next step is to reach the fifty followers and average of three viewers. Especially the last part, getting an average of three viewers during the full eight hours is tough. People quickly visit and leave after watching for a while, and as it is a chicken-egg issue (more viewers give more interaction making it more interesting to join in and stick around) they usually zap over to other channels after watching a few minutes. If lucky you get them to follow you and show up again at a later session.

In the last week of the year, I was lucky another developer channel on Twitch, going by the name of “one1lion”, to raid my channel when he ended streaming for the day and that gave exposure to my channel from another direction. I really appreciate him doing that for me and make sure you visit his channel; you can learn a thing or two from that.

Anyway, 2022 started with a blast for me, let’s see where we go this year and check in at my now Twitch Affiliate channel and hit the follow button!

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2018 Just started – Happy New Year

Blog 2018

A lot happened in 2017 on all levels …

Marcel Meijer, Fanie Reynders and I did our weekly SDN Cast again for the second year already. We only skipped a few weeks to attend some large conferences and create some impressions of the events. You can find all the videos on our YouTube channel: www.sdncast.nl/youtube (or direct link: www.youtube.com/sdncast).

I was awarded MVP for the 13th time in 2017, in fact twice for 2017 – once in January 2017 and ‘automagically’ renewed in July 2017 due to a change in the MVP Program cycles. Instead of 4 quarterly cycles to be renewed once a year the award cycle changed to July for everyone.

So for me for the first time since 2007 (as I was awarded in January of 2016) a New Years Day without the suspense of being renewed or not to be renewed. In 2018 the thrill is shifted to July so we’ll see what happens by then Smile.

Besides all of this we did three SDN Events (one day conference) an Office 365 Developer Bootcamp to teach Microsoft Teams development to a nice group of local developers (The Office Developer Bootcamp was a global initiative where everywhere in the world groups of people organized local Bootcamp events. Our Bootcamp was in Amsterdam last November).

But there was more … Dutch .NET Group Meetups, Build Conference, TechDays NL, Community MVP Event in Denmark and not to forget another year of great technologies!

Anyway … there happened too much to list here so that only leaves me to wishing you all the best for 2018 with many more events like we’ve seen in 2017!

The show must go on …

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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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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!

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