This year, both Dan Attis and myself recieved MVP awards from Microsoft. I am very honored that my contributions to the developer community have been recognized, and I hope to continue giving to the local community in the years to come... but at least now my wife can see something tangible to show for all of my involvement (she has a hard time with the fact that I spend almost every monday night out at UG meetings instead of being home with her).

Anyways, I am very pleased to have been given this award. Special thanks go to Doug Turnure for supporting us local guys, and also thanks to my wife for putting up with it all, and both my current (Wintellect) and former (Intellinet) employers for having the vision to support involvement in the community.

On Monday, July 9th (thats today!), Microsoft is trucking in a bunch of evangelists who will participate in an impromptu user group meeting at the Microsoft campus.

There will be three "tracks" of sessions, one covering Vista Internals (by Brian Hitney - NC), another covering Silverlight (by David Isbitski - PA), and the third covering the ASP.NET Provider Model (by Danilo Diaz - PA). After the main presentations, there will be an open Q&A period followed by "Whose Slide is it Anyway?" featuring Dev Evangelists being asked to present for a couple minutes based on a slide from someone else's decks that they have never seen before.

The festivities will begin as 6:30pm. If you have been to a Microsoft User Group meeting in the past 2 years, then you already know the place. If not, then the map and directions from this page on the Cutting Edge User Group website should get you there.

Doug Turnure has more information about the event on his weblog here.

Popper! is a simple Silverlight puzzle game. I wrote it as an exercise of my own skill with the platform, but then decided it was a rather fun (at least for a little while...) little game, so I am sharing it with the rest of the developer community. Popper! is written against Silverlight 1.1 alpha, and is mostly in C#, although the initial splash screen is done using unmanaged javaScript (yes, on purpose).

I will be walking through the innards of Popper! at the Atlanta Cutting Edge .NET User Group meeting tonight. So if you will be attending, then come check it out. Or if you just want to kill some time at "work" today... then play with it a little and let me know how it goes (good or bad)...

http://www.mindfusioncorp.com/popper/

I know of one minor bug so far: if you try to click around while a set of bubbles is in the process of "popping", then an error is raised internally, and the game pretty much stops working. I just haven't had the time to get that bug addressed yet.

I intend to post the source for this sometime after this month's meeting. Pretty much that equates to "when I have time to do it".