New year, new blog, CodeMash and MDC

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2009 has already been a very exciting year.  I opened up twitter on the morning of Jan 1st to see many of my friends receiving a Microsoft MVP award, how exciting!  I knew I was nominated so I thought I’d check too, nothing there, ah well, better luck next time.  I had then moved on and registered on a site that required me to validate my email address.  I didn’t see the email come in, so I checked my junk mail folder, lo and behold, there was the validation email and an email titled “Congratulations 2009 Microsoft MVP!” … needless to say I just about fell out of my chair.  This is an amazing opportunity for me to learn and grow, and share what I can [non-NDA of course] with the rest of the community and get the message from the community back to Microsoft, I am extremely excited to be given this honor.

Next came CodeMash, I am amazed at the size and quality of this conference every year.  I presented a talk on WPF data templates and got some very good interaction from the audience.  I feel this makes a session more successful than if a speaker was just up there talking for an hour.  Interaction with people in the  audience gives custom/catered content so that they are getting more out of the session, and in turn makes me feel satisfied that I provided added value to their attendance in the session.

On January 22nd, I get the opportunity to speak again at the Detroit MSDN Developer’s Conference (a.k.a MDC).  This will be my first time delivering content that is not my own, as well as my first time presenting with another presenter.  I have spent the last few months learning and applying the topics of this talk, and have gained some substantial knowledge in the process.  Needless to say, I am very excited and passionate about the technology that I’ll be presenting on and I hope to see you there so you too can share in my enthusiasm 🙂

So what’s up with this new blog?  I have one of those names that gets tortured all the time, so self-branding isn’t very easy.  Just this past week, I’ve been called Corey, and Casey, and countless other names.  I needed something original, that above all is easy to spell.  My middle son helped me pick out a name, and I added the “coding” prefix to it, needless to say “bandit” comes from the Monster Jam truck “Scarlet Bandit”, so the theme of the site is red and I now own the domain www.codingbandit.com .  Moving to hosting my own blog also gives me more flexibility, I can now display badges on my blog which I know sounds like a small thing, but it’s very freeing to have the ability to do this now.  I hope to be more active blogger this year.

Here’s to 2009, I am confident this will be a truly amazing year!

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