There are thousands of MVPs chosen by Microsoft for their contributions to technical communities. Eric Ligman says there are over 4,000 and I believe him. So of course nobody could choose a single "MVP of the year". There are several dozen this year, chosen from various technical areas and also for reasons that transcend a single technical area. I was delighted and honoured to be among them this year, and even more so to be joined by two of my fellow MVPs. To quote from an email telling us about it:

...the new 2010 C++ MVPs of the Year are

• Kate Gregory, for her very active role in promoting modern C++ application development, being among top speakers in some prominent conferences. Kate was also selected by peers (you guys) as C++ MVP of the Year.
• Marius Bancila – Ovidiu Cucu (shared), for the great job in CodExpert, their C++ community site (in Romanian language).
• Sheng Jiang, one of the top answerers in our MSDN Forums.

Is that amazing company or what? We were invited to dinner with a number of MS executives and the other MVPs of theyear during the MVP Summit. Here's a picture of us with Diego, the Visual C++ Community PM:




It was a great evening and it was nice to see C++ well represented.

Kate

The pace of C++-relevant video releases on Channel 9 sure feels like it's increased. I watched a few recently (I download them and then watch them in my copious free time) and they happen to fit well with some links I've been carrying around for a while, meaning to share.

Let's start with Herb Sutter talking with Erik Meijer about C++ and whatever else they felt like talking about. The resulting Channel 9 video is a must-watch, and for once I didn't crank it to 1.5x or 2x speed as I usually do with video interviews. When they get into the part about deriving future<T> from T, you might want to pause it and go read Thomas Petchel's post on automatic type deduction. And during the lambdas-and-closures part, let me recommend a quite old post by Eric Lippert and a followup to it that discusses how these things work for C# and how it's a little different in C++.

Then another two-smart-people talk, with Mohsen Agsen and Craig Symonds. It's great to get the high-level perspective of the value of C++ to any software firm. I love that phrase, dark matter, and you may have heard it from me before. After you've watched that one, you need to go immediately to Tony Goodhew's interview where he puts some numbers out that will drop your jaw.

I know, I'm asking for like 2 hours of your life. Even if you don't develop in C++ any more, you should watch these three videos. You really should. Call it industry research if you like. And if you wish you knew a C++ developer, you do

Kate

The PDC was a little different last year. It was held on the Microsoft Campus, meaning that only a thousand people could attend, when usually it's 5 times that. But it featured an amazing player that opened the whole conference up to the world. I was one of the 100,000 (yes, 100,000!) who watched online. If you are interested in some of the technical details, there's been a whitepaper released. You can read about it on the Windows Azure Team Blog. Makes sense, since Azure was a big part of the solution.

Kate

Are you doing Scrum? Do you use TFS? Then you should check out Urban Turtle. Brian Harry did (yes, that Brian Harry) and he really liked it - his blog post makes a great introduction. It gives you rich visibility onto your project and lets you work with it your own way. You can download a 30 day free trial to see if there is a good fit with the way your team fits and works.

If you like it, let me give you a tip. If you go to DevTeach in Montreal (which is so worth your while to attend on its own) you will get a 5-user license of Urban Turtle, which means you're effectively going to DevTeach for half price. And you can hear me speak on Windows 7 development, too.

Kate

Here's an interesting blog post. Say you use MFC and are wondering whether anything was added to it in a particular release. What tool would you use for that? How about CppDepend? If you've never used it, seeing how it provides the illustrations for this post should show you the appeal of it. Either way, you're going to learn something.

Kate

Pete Brown is a WPF guy and I've learned a lot from him. Now I get to watch him learn. Recently he wanted to write an add-in for IE and he decided to do it in C++. You can see how he struggled through it and get some tips of your own in the detailed post he wrote about the experience. I agree with the commenter who said you should only run Visual Studio as admin when you know you're going to do a step (like registration) that requires elevation, and you should run non-elevated the rest of the time, and the one who tweaked the string code to take advantage of being in C++. If you have some tweaks of your own, stop by and add a comment.

Kate

People talk a lot about work/life balance. There really is no such thing. They never deserve 50/50 which is what balance implies. But I read an interesting point in this summary of (and link to) a TED talk: over what period of time do you want to achieve some ratio of "work" and "life"? Every day? Most people prefer their weekends to have more "life" than "work". Over every individual week? I think we all would like to have weeks of vacation with no work at all, and most of us accept the occasional "crunch week" with more work than is comfortable. Over a 50 year period? That's not realistic at all. Think about that a bit. Then watch the video.

Kate

If you've been to a developer event this century, or if you spend any time on Channel 9, you've probably seen Beth Massi. I read an interesting interview with her by Carla Fair-Wright where she talks about what Microsoft is like, advises young women, and plugs LightSwitch. Did you think she was the I-was-programming-in-BASIC-when-I-was-8 type? Well now you know.

Kate

PS: the whole series is worth a read.