Woohoo! I just received the great mail I expect yearly on the first of July:
Dear Maarten Balliauw,
Congratulations! We are pleased to present you with the 2011 Microsoft® MVP Award! This award is given to exceptional technical community leaders who actively share their high quality, real world expertise with others. We appreciate your outstanding contributions in Windows Azure technical communities during the past year.
The Microsoft MVP Award provides us the unique opportunity to celebrate and honor your significant contributions and say "Thank you for your technical leadership."
Toby Richards
General Manager
Community & Online Support
This e-mail is not that clear about what technology one is an MVP, so I dug in… It seems that I will be leaving the largest group of MVP’s around: ASP.NET (sorry guys, you were great!) and joining the cloudheads of the Windows Azure group.
Thanks everyone for keeping me motivated in working with the community, sharing knowledge and providing me time to do all this. That last one means: thank you, boss, and thank you to my lovely wife!
Let’s start working on earning the award for next year…