The MVP program has become a marketing program to encourage becoming unpaid shills of Microsoft and MS products, where the best way in is to evangelize and write articles and tweets promoting Azure. Your social media presence is more of a factor for determining membership than any technical prowess.
They've even used it to encourage members (behind closed doors) to shill Microsoft links [1].
Well the program was always for helping the broader community, whether by writing tools, or participating in StackOverflow, or whatever... it was never a “Hall of Fame” for the best Windows programmers.
It's about helping MS market their products by encouraging devs to pimp their tools/products under the guise of "technical excellence" that everyone used to look up to.
An award for being one of MS's best pimpers just doesn't hold the same level of street cred.
Now whenever I see someone wearing an MVP badge in their twitter bio I immediately discredit their pro-MS "advice" as an MVP shill wanting to score points towards their next renewal.
I've been a C# MVP for many years before they didn't renew me because I was too critical towards MS' direction (this was before they OSS-ed .NET). When I was awarded, it felt like I received an award for my position in the .NET community. When I didn't get a renewal years later it felt like I didn't get it because I didn't fit into their marketing machine. It was fine by me btw. The free MSDN universal subscription is nice, but that's about it.
> ServiceStack has been a valuable contribution to the .NET community, and your continued development/support of it should defacto make you an MVP.
Yes, and back in the days when I received my MVP title, this kind of thinking was part of the criteria. Nowadays... no way. It started 7-8 years ago I think when they decided there couldn't be more than X mvp's for a given category and they wanted at least Y mvp's in a given region. So less in the west, and more in say India. While it's fine to make it a more world-wide program and recognize people in communities which are less known to people in 'the west', the criteria to accomplish this changed with it: if you started a user group somewhere in a region without an mvp and someone nominated you, you had a good chance becoming one.
This is all OK btw, if your criteria is about evangelizing. If your criteria is about 'the people who are the most skilled in ABC' then it's not. So this shift in who would receive the award changed the program.
Nowadays it's rather silly tbh. If you want to get renewed you have to fill in a form where you describe why you want to get renewed. wtf... it's an award you receive. Why would you need to tell MS why you'd want to receive an award you haven't received yet as they decide who gets it...
I see the same thing happening with almost all "most valuable" type awards or badges. Every big tech company that has it now uses it almost exclusively as a PR campaign. The MV% roster of some companies looks more like a list of social media influencers than a list of truly most valuable professionals, with the latter losing ground year after year.
No, I wouldn't lend credence to a program that serves as an echo chamber to further insulate .NET's bubble.
It's one of the marketing tools used to self-reinforce .NET's mono culture - which I view as the worst thing about .NET.
It stopped being anything remotely to do with technical merit or being an "MVP" years ago. I'd prefer to see the program abolished, then maybe we'll start seeing more tech diversity in .NET.
Thank you for speaking up about the monoculture in .NET, it’s a personal bugbear of mine working in a primarily .NET shop - for all the praise people like to heave on the NuGet package collection so much revolves around Microsoft’s own frameworks and supporting libraries and other products.
People have arguments in JVM-land about why you should use X web framework or Y SQL/ORM library or Z foobaz. Too often in the .Net world I see complete dismissal of everything but ASP.Net MVC, EF+MSSQL, etc. Oh, and of course you should use Azure for everything.
I freaking love F#, and to a lesser extent C# - but I can’t stand .NET as a whole because of this.
One of the things I love about .NET is the monoculture. It means that I can jump on any .net stack and have extensive experience with their ORM, their IDE, their language, their sql database, their mvc framework, their front end language, and even their mobile stack. It's one of the few stacks that truly allows you to be a full stack developer with ease. I love solving algorithmic problems, I love data modelling, I love learning about the domain, I love solving software engineering problems to deliver useful software people love. I dont like spending time going through documentation and learning yet another technology that accomplishes the same thing.
98% of projects can be accomplished just as well with react or Angular, typescript or Vue, mysql or sql server, hibernate or EF, asp.net mvc or Nancy, c# or f#, git or tfs, Asana or VSTS. These decisions don't matter nearly as much as the expertise of the team. So it's nice to be able to field or join a team of experts on every part of the stack and focus on solving problems with technology and not the technology.
Only if you ignore the entire .NET OSS community, most of which puts out better versions of everything you list than the default Microsoft stuff.
I do think I understand your point - there is comfort in knowing there is one default solution for almost every abstraction. But how much can you love it when each one tends to be mediocre?
Disclosure: I spent 10 years working on .NET from 2006 to 2016 , so I've missed the last revolution of .NET Core, so maybe things got better?
Webforms was absolutely awful and I've worked with technologies so terrible they single handedly sank projects.[0] . But I've never found that modern .NET defaults were so terrible it wasn't made up for by the voluminous amounts of documentation(not just official documentation but stack overflows/blog posts etc) that you get from the default option. Whatever weird issue you end up running into there is a documented fix which can save anywhere from hours to days of time..
Not sure what you worked on but .NET has gotten better since 2016 but not by leaps and bounds(exception EF Core is leaps and bounds better than the prev. version). I've always thought asp.net mvc was good, newest one is better but not by a huge margin. Original EF was bad but EF Core is far better. TFS was mediocre but now everyone uses git. Typescript is absolutely delightful. Xamarin's kind of painful but all cross platform mobile development seems to be. Visual Studio is probably best in class of the heavy duty IDE's. I've heard complaints about nuget but it always seems reliable which is more than I can say about npm. The work item tracking kind of sucks but it makes up for it with streamlined integration from the IDE->commit->task tracking->time tracking->reporting->invoicing.
The part of the stack that always bothered me were the poorly designed DevExpress/Infragistics controls that were ubiquitous. They get weird impossible to debug errors. They seem to trade extensibility for endless amounts of configuration. But with modern .NET applications you don't see them anymore which has brought me great joy.
[0] - One time upper management forced all of the devs in the organization to use a high performance real time database that fell down with 200 points/minute. And would sometimes(monthly) crash so hard both the data and the installation and sometimes the vm were unrecoverable. It took 3 days to install and we required one full time person on a team of 5 whose full time job(she was working 60 hr weeks) was just to keep 3 instances running(Dev/test/stage).
Say what you will about Java -- Oracle are shitheads and Java was late to the generics and lambda parties -- but it deserves full props for getting the most influential free software organization that doesn't involve RMS or ESR, the Apache Foundation, on board in the late nineties, and that has shaped the Java ecosystem to this day and made it more open and inclusive. Still not ideal, but it's the enterprise platform I trust the most.
Oracle has done a lot for Java, which has stagnant under Sun, is a member of the community since 1996 when they presented alongside Sun the NC running a Java based OS, and besides IBM no one else cared about Sun's future.
Even Google if they wanted to actually get away with their little action, could have taken the opportunity to own Java.
Being on a Java/.NET/C++ shop, I hardly notice a difference between Java and .NET mono-cultures.
It was mostly JEE or Spring, Swing or SWT, Ant or Maven, .... everything else tends to be loved in online forums but hardly seen live across the globe.
Stack Overflow recent survey results are yet another proof of it, every JVM language that is going to "replace" Java is stuck in single digit percentage.
> Being on a Java/.NET/C++ shop, I hardly notice a difference between Java and .NET mono-cultures.
Don't confuse your corporate monoculture for a monoculture of an entire ecosystem.
> It was mostly JEE or Spring, Swing or SWT, Ant or Maven, .... everything else tends to be loved in online forums but hardly seen live across the globe.
Yeah, big frameworks are still popular, nothing surprising about that. Thing is, these big frameworks are usually designed to be modular out of the box - if you don't like a certain component don't use it and pull in something else. No need to throw the baby out with the bathwater, and there is plenty of choice for individual parts of your stack without nixing Spring Framework or CDI. Hell, even if you do you have micro-frameworks like Dropwizard that are just various components welded together because the ecosystem makes doing it fairly easy.
> Stack Overflow recent survey results are yet another proof of it, every JVM language that is going to "replace" Java is stuck in single digit percentage.
And? Nothing "needs" to replace the language, though nothing until Kotlin has ever been in a position to even be a #2. Scala can't stop breaking compatibility every release, nobody ever heard of Ceylon, Groovy & Clojure don't fit the same statically-typed niche. All of these work though, and they all can share code with each other so it doesn't have to be a zero-sum game either.
> And? Nothing "needs" to replace the language, though
I think this is a really important thing about JVM langauges. They can exist successfully at much lower thresholds of popularity because they piggy back on Java. So I don't have to worry about Groovy dying off (which is not to say it is) - because basically as long as Java is around it is going to have access to a giant community of developers. So using Groovy or Clojure or Scala etc is a much lower risk proposition than jumping in the deep end with a stand alone language. In that sense, Groovy / Clojure / Scala / Kotlin don't really compete with each other or Java as much as help each other, and Java's popularity is really the sum of all of them.
> So I don't have to worry about Groovy dying off (which is not to say it is)
Apache Groovy is dying off. Whenever some software product bundles it as a built-in scripting language, after a short time Groovy's snags become apparent and that software starts bundling another scripting solution, e.g. Kotlin for build scripts in Gradle [1], or the Declarative Pipeline Syntax for Jenkins [2].
Mind explaining this more? I love EF and how quickly you can get spin up a database and get started writing LINQ queries against it. Also how easy it is to get code reuse which is a pain in the butt with sql, or throw together a multi tenant app with global query filters.
You can quickly get a database spun up, but that time is offset by many of the warts that you'll run into later on.
For example, you'll quickly realize you need to have ```AsNoTracking``` on your queries because the performance is terrible.
You'll also find that you can batch update/delete items.
I've also had problems with migrations after updating EF Core (don't remember exactly).
You can get spun up quickly, with Linq, using something like Dapper or ServiceStack.OrmLite. They work on raw ADO.NET, so they are incredibly easy to reason/work with. The errors that you'd run into wont be shrouded in layers/abstractions that are specific to EF/Core.
I definitely think you're right that as ORMs move farther away from the bare SQL abstractions leak and when things break they break in bizarre hard to grok ways.
But I also think that heavier duty ORMs have their place. Recent circumstances have meant that I'm building out a lot of applications from start to finish in one to three weeks. These applications deal with very little data, the largest tables are in the 1000's of records and in circumstances like that I need crank developer productivity to 11 and for that I'm willing to sacrifice performance and simplicity. And for that EF has been a great companion.
I've also used a combination of EF and DACPAC. Where I used DACPAC to manage the schema and migrations and used EF for CRUD and that's been a pretty great combo.
And I definitely have to drop down to sql, especially for reporting/analysis type queries.
Does what you say also apply to EF Core? I don't know the previous EF version, but EF Core seemed simple to me. Particularly after comparing it with what I knew about Hibernate.
Not your OP, but when I was in the program it was because MSFT people found me and awarded it to me based on posts I had already done. I didn't apply. It was in 1992 when the big transition to Windows 3.1 was underway. I had already been assisting people with Windows programming questions on Compuserve, because of my belief that it was then an important transition. I believed it was going to be easier than people thought, and my aid was meant to help people see this. When my priorities changed and I stopped posting, MSFT didn't award me MVP status again. The MSFT self-interest was that the awards were things that made it easier for us to post more, such as comp'ing the minutes we spent in the Windows forum on Compuserve and the like. Although I heard rumors of MSFT leaders/liasons encouraging individuals to post after their awards, I didn't get such communications personally. I bet it's all different now but I have had not been involved.
Reading the fine article I can see that the program continued to be in essence the program I participated in, with more responsibility on the participant's part to keep MSFT informed of why one might deserve the award, and less support of late for folks posting intensely technical material such as DDK.
I don't know a lot about the programme, but I would have assumed there was always a similar focus on Microsoft's interests. Did they used to support people who weren't very interested in new/trendy/popular MS technologies?
My anecdote is someone gets a cert and now has extremely limited understanding of the technologies and wants to use it for everything. I've had to fight back against the idea that the solutions are cheaper, that everyone doing ETL needs elastic MapReduce, etc. I think it is compounded by things like acloudguru pushing out sales engineer (associate architect, literally just the selling points of the tech) certifications by teaching the exam basically question for question, so actual understanding is minimal.
My point being that people who get them evangelize AWS and the certs themselves teach absolutely no technical competency. Compound this with requiring x number for cert holders for partnership benefits I think it was clearly intended to get people excited about selling AWS rather than exhibiting any kind of competence with primitives and concepts compared to something like CCN*.
What certificate holder doesn't evangelize their product? if they don't implement the thing from the certificate,what would be the point of learning the thing in the first place?
certificates are a very "corporate developer" thing, where your bonuses and future career growth are dependent on very specific measurable metrics
I have been a Microsoft MVP from 2006-2018. While I was proud to be part of a group of so many smart people at the beginning, my professional and personal life changed over the years and I stopped blogging regularly, never engaged in their new web forums (which replaced the newsgroups – anyone remembers them? ;)) and finally filtered out all of the many emails and newsletters coming to my inbox. So I would say for 10 out of 12 years I have been a ghost. A ghost that has been "re-awarded" every year – for whatever reason. I think that alone tells you something about the value of that "title".
A few years ago I told my friend "If I ever add 'Microsoft MVP' to my Twitter bio shoot me"
I don't know why seeing this made me cringe so much. Probably because it was so transparently a ploy from Microsoft to make their most loyal devs feel special in hopes that they'd promote Microsoft tools more.
I've seen this first hand at several conferences where Microsoft "MVP"s come on to the stage and try to make Microsoft seem all "hip" and "rad" rather than talking about real engineering and technical improvements, it was not only nauseating - so many people could clearly see right through it.
wow, that's extreme. I'm sure people working for msft back in the day had no idea what the bigger picture was. It's easy to say this stuff now (about msft setting the industry back etc) but when you're in amongst it you're just a cog in the machine. I'm sure most people working there just wanted to get paid and felt they were contributing to the biggest tech company in the world.
> Where I used to get weekly updates, and focused, useful, invitations to what are called “Product Group Interactions” — stuff about the new WDK or changes to OS features — I now get an endless stream of invitations to SQL and SharePoint events.
If I had to wager why it seems like the MVP program dieing (I have no clue if it is, this is the first post I've ever read about the MVP meta) it has to do with this point the author called out.
I suspect that, at least in its early days, the MVP program help guide product development teams. In return for helping guide development, these MVP's were given preferential treatment over other customers and access to insider information. Now that Microsoft is (at least appearing) more open, they can get their feedback from their open source communities.
Even Stackoverflow kills the need for MS MVPs. In the dinosaur days before SO, you'd have MVPs answering questions around the Internet or within their particular community.
Not just open source communities, given that Microsoft spun out a lot of the "early interaction/feedback" stuff into the broader, easier to opt-in/opt-out Insider programs.
MVP is an anachronism. A legacy of the old Microsoft, when a monopoly had to build the entire community around his brand. Nowadays open communities cannot be driven, Microsoft knows this and I think the MVP program does not fit in this new Microsoft focused on services as it is.
Hi, I’m Lenn from Microsoft, and I have responsibility for the MVP program. I appreciate the feedback, and apologize that we didn’t respond to your earlier emails. We will get back to you directly to address your questions and concerns. The MVP program does evolve over time and our goal is to ensure that it stays relevant and meaningful for participants. On behalf of Microsoft, we really appreciate your support of the program and community.
What a BS response. Now I don’t mean this personally (I’m sure you just wish the best to all of us just like most people here) but it doesn’t take anything away from the main point which is that the company can’t even be bothered to respond officially and the best this “MVP” can hope for is an unofficial acknowledgement from an employee outside of work time.
My team did indeed miss the email from Pete unfortunately, I am not afraid to admit it. We feel bad about it and have sent him a personal apology that he didn't get a reply after 15 years. We are heads down reviewing 3,300 MVP renewal applications until the end of May and his CPM missed it in the flood of emails that comes her way this time of year. Our bad, and we own it and are sorry we made him feel disrespected for his 15 years of contributions to the community and Microsoft.
The purpose of his comment was to downplay that his team only let 1 of his emails slip through the "flood of emails" they receive. Whereas the whole reason why Pete's resigning his MVP in the first place because he felt he and his deep technical interests were being ignored. Not receiving a courtesy reply after multiple emails and 15 years of Service confirms as such.
and lets be honest, the only reason why he's getting any kind of response now is because it became an open resignation letter that's shining a light on the purpose and current state of the MVP program.
Let's face it, MSFT is dropping all of their eggs into the cloud basket and, whilst this isn't necessarily a bad thing, the byproduct is what the MVP sees: Invitations to things like roadmaps for COSMOS DB, which is almost purely an Azure service and has nothing to do with the scope of the MVP's expertise.
Others have suggested that SO and the OSS community, in general, are much wider audiences for MSFT to receive feedback from and that's not, inherently, true. MSFT still avails of things like the BETA program[0], so they still (seemingly) recognise that they have a need for that feedback loop (for the most part).
What seems to happen at Microsoft is constant culture shifts, based purely on who's making the most money at the time. In the previous years, it was Office that was the top dog, now it's Azure and, not surprisingly, things are changing in the company to push the biggest seller.
The byproduct of that, of course, is that everything else gets thrown to the wayside by chasing these new endeavours (by constantly changing directions) and not having a plan to fluidly bring everything forward and inline.
I remember the battle between Jamie Cansdale and Microsoft regarding Jamie's MVP status [1]. The TL;DR was that Jamie developed TestDriven.NET as an add-on to Visual Studio. He released it for the pay versions and the free version: Visual Studio Express. Microsoft wanted him to make it unavailable for Express and decided to kick him out of the MVP program because they didn't want nice features in the free version of Visual Studio. ;)
They also kicked out Karl Peterson, who designed the first MVP logo (the diamond with the large MVP inside it) and wrote about 3000+ reply posts a year in various visual basic groups. The reason? He was a VB6 MVP and very vocal against VB.NET. Yes, you can't have the spear head of a community you just kicked in the nuts with a 'VB.NET' in the program that is designed to promote that successor tech, now can we...
What's the practical function of MVP in the era of GitHub and open source where everyone can join discussion with devs and PMs without a need to be part of any elitist group?
Just to keep a handful of folks still proud of their MVP badges they earned in 2001?
The Windows kernel driver development was one of the most hardcore programming in software development, requiring in depth knowledge of the kernel and a very different mindset. Have to be very defensive and thorough, or things would go badly.
This is completely understandable. I've submitted for MVP for a product (not Microsoft, but built on Microsoft technologies) and I never get it due to the fact that I don't re-tweet all day and focus on development.
Ditto. I was twice nominated a while back, by existing MVPs, didn't get it, and had the distinct sense it was because I didn't tweet or run webinars or whatever to the glory of MSFT. What I did do was write and release some pretty decent free tools with .NET, and participated extensively on anything to do with Active Directory or ADFS. It was rather demoralizing.
Before ASP came out, I wrote a DLL to connect IIS to VB5/6 applications. I was also the VB guide on The Mining Company (which became about.com around 1997). This was enough of a resume that I was awarded the title MVP for IIS/ASP. I got a watch, notepad and pen. Seemed pretty cool for an 18 year old in smalltown Ontario.
Eventually, they announced that VB6 was the end of the line for COM and VB.net was VB in name alone. I was one of about 100 MVPs that signed a petition encouraging MSFT to keep VB moving forward as a parallel product. "No, and stop asking" was the reply.
Fast forward a few years, and I saw the original DHH "Build a blog in 15 minutes with Ruby on Rails" video. What I saw didn't even seem possible. I knew that it was going to be a big deal, and the next day my friends and I cofounded the first Rails consultancy in the world circa Fall 2004. This led to my first Mac Mini, and deploying to Linux. Today I only boot into Windows to do VR and hologram stuff.
I haven't thought about my MVP certificate in over a decade, but I'm confident that it exists in a box. I'm honestly a little shocked to know that it's been going all this time.
Writing low-level magic and solving gnarly bugs seems to be linked to making hardware in the first place.
Microsoft MVP is still a very west-centric program. If I had to guess, I'd wager the rising stars of this world are in Asia where the new hardware is being made. Microsoft doesn't really reach out to them, and I guess the feeling of disinterest is mutual.
no response from PM, amazing!
I've been MVP for (just) 6y, 2012-2016, and probably replaced that many community PMs, and few categories also, that I didn't know where I belong any more.
And last year, when I thought I did my biggest contribution by organizing workshops and meetup talks, writing OSS, and finally got great feedback from real people, not just page views of blog or twitter reach, they called me and said its not enough. And that I can apply next year when I do more of the things they measure, whatever that is this year! I just don't care any more.
I wasn't aware of the program till recently and just thought it was a marketing gimmick for vaguely technical people who can throw a little open source varnish on the company.
They've even used it to encourage members (behind closed doors) to shill Microsoft links [1].
[1] https://twitter.com/rickasaurus/status/636269822595235840