Dear blog, it’s been a while since my last post

Ido Flatow — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 06:16:46 GMT

If you’ve been wondering where I disappeared to in the last couple of weeks, and if you are still waiting anxiously for my next post about WCF 4.5, fear not, I’m here, I’m alive, and I’m still kicking.

It’s been quite a rough month, as I have been occupied knee deep in home renovations. If you’ve ever dealt with contractors, technicians, and handyman, you know the type of frustration I’m talking about.

Between re-tiling my floors, replacing my kitchen cabinets, and re-painting my entire home, I also managed to find the time to deliver some courses on Windows Azure, IIS, Advanced WCF, Windows HPC Server, AppFabric Cache, and PowerShell.

2012 is going to be very productive year – this year is going to be a lot about the new releases of .NET 4.5, VS11, and Windows Server 8. I’m guessing you’ll see many more posts about the new features of WCF 4.5 (soon to come – a new post about the new streaming features of WCF 4.5 over IIS), .NET 4.5, and VS11.

I’m also continuing my voyage with BigData solutions which I’ve started last year with my work on the Windows HPC Server 2008 R2, and the new HPC labs we’ve created in Sela for the Windows Azure Platform Training Kit. This year is mostly going to be about Hadoop on Azure, so expect new labs and demos soon on the WAP TK (Windows Azure Platform Training Kit).

This year I will continue to manage the Israeli Web Developer Community (WDCIL) along with Gal Kogman, and in a couple of days I will also start to moderate the WebDev IL MSDN forum with Sholomo Goldberg, AKA the DotNet Rabbi.

I’m also continuing my speaking engagements this year, which ended last year with my sessions at VSLive Redmond and MCT Summit in October and VSLive Orlando in December. Other than my usual appearances at Sela’s SDP conferences in Israel, I will also be speaking this April in the Great Indian Developer Summit (GIDS) in Bangalore (India of course), and hopefully in additional conferences in Europe and the US (more information to come in the next couple of weeks).

So check out for my posts, my tweets, my courses, and my speaking engagements, and don’t forget – if you need me, just turn on the bat signal, and I’ll come to your rescue, just kidding – you can always contact me through my blog, my tweeter account, or send me an email, and I’ll do my best to answer you promptly.

Happy new year to y’all, enjoy the new leap year, and hopefully we’ll still be here to see 2013.

The month of October bears good news

Ido Flatow — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 01:46:20 GMT

October began yesterday with an email from Microsoft congratulating me for receiving Microsoft’s Most Valuable Professional (MVP) award. I’m a connected system developer MVP, which kind of describes my work – working with distributed systems, connecting clients and servers, building WCF services, ASP.NET applications, working with IIS servers, etc…

This is the first time I receive the MVP award, so I’m quite excited. Special thanks to the people who helped with my nomination – Guy Burstein and Meir Pinto from Microsoft Israel, to my managers at Sela Group – David Bassa and Ishai Ram, and of course to all of you that are reading my blog, that come to my sessions in conferences, to the hundreds of people I trained over the years, and to those whose nickname I only know that marked my answers as correct in forums. Congratulations also to my colleagues in Sela – Arik Poznanski for his new MVP in Visual C#, and to Gil Fink for his third year in a row of being a Data Platform MVP.

As I said before, this month bears many good news – next week I’m heading to Microsoft HQ in Redmond, where I’m going to attend an Azure Platform Metro course. Metro courses are special Microsoft courses that are constructed by DPE teams in Microsoft (developer and platform evangelists) and are intended to teach new technologies for eager developers. I’m going to participate in this course with several other trainers from all over the world, and learn the newest stuff in the Azure platform from Microsoft’s experts, so it’s going to be a great experience for me, and I’m very much looking forward to it.

October goes on with good stuff – the following week after the course I’m going to attend the Visual Studio Live! conference in Redmond (17-21 of October), this time not as a listener, but as a speaker.
I’m giving two sessions in the conference, about the new features of WCF 4, and about the new face of web development – ASP.NET MVC, jQuery, and Razor.

And for the finale of October – after my two sessions, I’m catching a flight to San-Francisco to attend the North-America 2011 MCT Summit (Microsoft Certified Trainers Summit), which is also during 19-21 of October. In the summit I will be presenting yet again the new features of WCF 4, but will also probably spend some time talking about teaching tips for the official WCF 4 course (10263A) that I co-authored last year for Microsoft.

If you are working in the area of Seattle or San-Francisco, and interested in WCF consulting or training, let me know as I have a few days off that I can dedicate to consultations and courses. I will be available in the Seattle area between 14-17 of October, and in the San-Francisco area between 21-22 of October. I also have a 9-hour connection in Newark on the 23rd, if you want a quick consultation

October started great with my new MVP, and it’s going to end great with two weeks of learning and speaking in the US.

Ido Flatow's Blog

Veni Vidi Scripsi

Dear blog, it’s been a while since my last post

The month of October bears good news