The last few weeks have been very busy for me and unfortunately I don’t have much time for blogging… I wanted to give a quick update however because I receive great news a couple of days ago in my inbox: I’ve been re-awarded MVP in the Client App !

This nomination is my second one. The past 12 months have been very interesting and exciting for me:
• I was the speaker during the Microsoft Techdays in Paris
• I went to the US the first time in order to meet other MVPs in Redmond for the Global MVP Summit
• I started new interesting projects at work involving new Microsoft technologies I was not very familiar with

About the MVP award, I’d also like to thank my co-worker Charlotte who is very often helping me by polishing articles I wrote, giving technical presentations with me, etc. I think part of this award is for her too 🙂

This post is also an occasion to bring the topic of the future of WPF and Silverlight on the table… As you probably know there have been a lot of rumors and debates lately about this. My opinion is simple:

• The message from Microsoft during the first preview of Windows 8 should have been “you’d have the ability to develop apps using HTML5” instead “these apps will be develop using HTML5” (which lead to the WPF/SL/.Net are dead discussions…)
• The future of XAML is exciting: the decision to move the XAML team from DevDiv to WinDiv is a sign that XAML will play a big role in Windows 8 (probably for both native and managed apps which is huge)
• WPF and Silverlight are both good UI technologies, we might see something new coming in Windows 8 but I think it’ll be based on concepts we’re already familiar with (such as binding, XAML…)

If you want to read more about Windows 8 you can check out those posts:

• Strange times in the world of Microsoft developers (by Josh Smith)
• Microsoft needs to tell Windows 8 developers now about ‘Jupiter’ and Silverlight (by Mary-Jo Foley)

Hopefully we don’t have to wait for a very long time since the BUILD conference is September should give many answers to us.

PS: most of my lack of time for writing new blog posts come from a new house we just moved in with my girlfriend… We’re now 10 minutes from the city center of Grenoble 🙂