Microsoft MVP Reconnect

A New Community from Microsoft

The other day, my colleague, who is a current Microsoft MVP, told me about a program that Microsoft was putting together to bring past MVPs together in a community. The program is called MVP Reconnect.

I was awarded Microsoft MVP status for two different areas: The first area was ODBC, the second was for Win32.  Both of these are far enough back that Microsoft doesn't have records, so I had to pull up and email them scans of the various letters I had received in 1995 and in 2000 for my MVP awards.  About a week ago (May 2018) I was accepted in the MVP Reconnect community.

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MVP for ODBC Contributions

Back in 1995 when the Microsoft ODBC forum was hosted on the Compuserve network, I found that I answered more questions than I asked when I was on there. As a person who developed and deployed ODBC based solutions, and write ODBC drivers and back-end server software to serve the SQL syntax that was key to ODBC, I found that I had a unique understanding of how the middleware worked, so I was able to help many people with answers, regardless what driver or applications they were using.

Back in the day, some of the most prolific members of that forum included Microsoft employees: Murali Venkatrao, and Mike Pizzo, and non-Microsoft people: Lee Fesperman, Ronald Laeremans, Charles, McDevitt, Rob Macdonald, Mark Edwards and Dale Hunscher.  And many more whose names don't come to me now.  Between us we helped a lot of people in the early days of ODBC.

Microsoft release ODBC 1.0 in 1992. Unfortunately, the first ODBC-compatible versions of their Office suite really didn't play well with anyone else's ODBC drivers. Their applications only supported their own drivers. It was the next version of Office that finally provided real ODBC connectivity.

By 1995, my contributions were recognized, and I became an MVP (the program started in 1993, I believe.)  This award continued until they moved all Microsoft forums from Compuserve to MSN in 1998.  Unfortunately, I was running on Windows NT, and you needed Windows 95 to access MSN, which had a proprietary front-end application, so I got knocked off the network. Even if I had had access, no one posted any questions to the MSN network.  I continued to respond on the Compuserve network and the ODBC forum owners gave me free access for several years beyond that because of my contributions.

MVP for Win32

Then in 2000, I was awarded MVP status again, because of contributions I was making to Win32 developer forums.  That was before .NET was released, and I was doing a lot of C++ development.

MVP Reconnect

With all the attendant perks, and the chance to reconnect with some community minded industry experts, this was a pleasant surprise! I'm looking forward to interacting with this community!