It’s very common for myself and other Microsoft MVPs to get asked “What does it take to become a Microsoft MVP” or “I want to be a Microsoft MVP, please tell me what I can do” when we speak at conferences or chat with each other on social networks. The short answer is most people outside of Microsoft do not know that the “secret formula” is. The long answer requires a little bit of understanding of how Microsoft evaluates potential candidates for receiving the award and what the propose of the award is. The rest of this post is my opinion on how you can become a Microsoft MVP. To see what Microsoft says about how you can become a Microsoft MVP visit http://mvp.microsoft.com/en-us/becoming-an-mvp.aspx For one to earn the Microsoft MVP award, Microsoft has to see the recipient as someone who provides value to the Microsoft ecosystem and is influential in the software industry. The award is given based on the previous year’s contributions to the Microsoft ecosystem and is from one of the product teams. Product teams include Microsoft Office, Microsoft Azure, Microsoft .NET and many others. Each product group budgets for a certain number of MVPs a year, depending on the specialty, there can be very few spots to many spots available to for new candidates. In addition to this, you need to get nominated by a Microsoft MVP or Microsoft employee for Microsoft to consider you. OK, so how can I provide value to the Microsoft ecosystem you ask. That’s the tricky spot; there are no fixed rules, minimum contributions or formula for getting in. That being said there are a few things you can do to get on the radar:

There are so many devices that are connected to our home networks nowadays. I have multiple Amazon Fire Sticks, computers, smart TVs, mobile phones, smart appliances, and so much more. At any given time, there are around forty devices connected to my home network. Since working from home, I have three to four machines that are constantly ‘on the internet’. The main house TV, my work computer, my son’s computer or Xbox, and the daughter’s Fire Stick/YouTube. These devices are typically streaming in some way, shape, or form. All of these devices, plus the other 30 or so on, were taxing my router. I currently don’t have any CAT5/6/7 wiring in my house, so I tried extending my wireless network a few different ways.

Microsoft Identity Web is a library which contains a set of reusable classes used in conjunction with ASP.NET Core for integrating with the Microsoft identity platform (formerly Azure AD v2.0 endpoint) and AAD B2C.

This article provides instructions on how to use certificates for authentication with the Microsoft Identity Library in .NET applications.

Let’s take a look at how you can set up and configure Azure Key Vault to store Code Signing Certificates

In this post, I’m going to walk through how you authenticate and use an API that is secured with Azure Active Directory using React Native and the Microsoft Identity library.

In this post, I’m going to walk through how you authenticate and use an API that is secured with Azure Active Directory using React Native and the Microsoft Identity library.

Since I got bitten by the CI/CD bug, I’ve been looking at ways to clean up some code-bases and make it easier to deploy and store less unneeded files in my repositories. This time around it got me looking into Yarn

This morning I was working on a blog post on getting started with Developer Containers. For this, I opened up Visual Studio Code and JetBrains Rider. Once I opened them side by side, I noticed that the files on the file list in their “Explorers’” were in a different sort order. This confused me because, at least I think, they have always been in the same order, dotted (.) folders first, then underscored (_) folders, then “regular”, then files. That was not the case for Visual Studio Code it was sorted with underscored (_) folders first, then dotted (.) folders, then “regular”, then files.

This month in a chat with the speakers of ESPC one of the United States based speakers asked about some travel gear recommendations. I shared my travel gear with them and they found it helpful. I thought it would be a good idea to share it with you all. I have been using this gear for a while now and I am very happy with it. I hope you find it helpful too.

Let’s take a look how you can build an Azure pipeline that will build your NuGet package, sign it, then deploy it to Azure Artifacts

For the last week or so I’ve been working on modernizing the Desert Code Camp site which meant that I am basically rewriting it. :smile: Part of the rewrite is to make all of the user facing functionality, adding/viewing sessions, viewing the schedule, etc., available from an API and not code behind. I spent the last week or so designing and implementing the API in ASP.NET Core 6. The technology used in building the API does not matter for this post but the example repository is in ASP.NET Core. While testing the application, I started to heavily use the HTTP Client feature of JetBrains Rider. The HTTP Client is a bundled plugin, which is enabled by default, which allows you to emulate calls to a web service or web API. It works very much like Postman, but in the IDE and included.

There has been much talk on social media about being a Software Engineer/Developer/Programmer in the last week or so, probably because we are all being safe and staying in our houses with not much else to do. Conversations have included what it takes to be an engineer, how to get started in engineering, and explaining what a ‘Software Engineer’ does.

It’s very common for myself and other Microsoft MVPs to get asked “What does it take to become a Microsoft MVP” or “I want to be a Microsoft MVP, please tell me what I can do” when we speak at conferences or chat with each other on social networks. The short answer is most people outside of Microsoft do not know that the “secret formula” is. The long answer requires a little bit of understanding of how Microsoft evaluates potential candidates for receiving the award and what the propose of the award is. The rest of this post is my opinion on how you can become a Microsoft MVP. To see what Microsoft says about how you can become a Microsoft MVP visit http://mvp.microsoft.com/en-us/becoming-an-mvp.aspx For one to earn the Microsoft MVP award, Microsoft has to see the recipient as someone who provides value to the Microsoft ecosystem and is influential in the software industry. The award is given based on the previous year’s contributions to the Microsoft ecosystem and is from one of the product teams. Product teams include Microsoft Office, Microsoft Azure, Microsoft .NET and many others. Each product group budgets for a certain number of MVPs a year, depending on the specialty, there can be very few spots to many spots available to for new candidates. In addition to this, you need to get nominated by a Microsoft MVP or Microsoft employee for Microsoft to consider you. OK, so how can I provide value to the Microsoft ecosystem you ask. That’s the tricky spot; there are no fixed rules, minimum contributions or formula for getting in. That being said there are a few things you can do to get on the radar:

In a previous post, I demonstrated how you can protect an ASP.NET Core Web API using the Microsoft Identity Platform. In this post, we are going to look at what you need to do to have an ASP.NET Core MVC application interact with the same protected API. It’s really easy, once you figure it out! :wink:

Microsoft Identity Web is a library which contains a set of reusable classes used in conjunction with ASP.NET Core for integrating with the Microsoft identity platform (formerly Azure AD v2.0 endpoint) and AAD B2C.

I was chatting with Dave Brock (@daveabrock) about our .NET 5 presentations today (.NET 5 - What is it?). He mentioned that he wanted to “steal” my PowerPoint embed feature. Dave’s a nice guy and all but is it really stealing if you ask for it? :smile:

Let’s take a look how you can build an Azure pipeline that will build your NuGet package, sign it, then deploy it to Azure Artifacts

GitHub Pages has deprecated the legacy worker and will be removed by the end of June 2024. The legacy worker was used to build and deploy Jekyll sites on GitHub Pages. The new way to build and deploy Jekyll sites on GitHub Pages is to use GitHub Actions. This post will show you how to migrate your Jekyll site from the legacy worker to GitHub Actions.

Microsoft Identity Web is a library which contains a set of reusable classes used in conjunction with ASP.NET Core for integrating with the Microsoft identity platform (formerly Azure AD v2.0 endpoint) and AAD B2C.

I was chatting with Dave Brock (@daveabrock) about our .NET 5 presentations today (.NET 5 - What is it?). He mentioned that he wanted to “steal” my PowerPoint embed feature. Dave’s a nice guy and all but is it really stealing if you ask for it? :smile:

I’ve been working on a personal project of mine called “JosephGuadagno.NET Broadcasting”. I know a terrible name, but I’ll work on a better name when it’s ready to be launched. :smile: This application is a web application that allows users to broadcast their content to their followers. One of the components of the application is an API that allows users to create and schedule their content in the application. The application is built using ASP.NET Core, Azure, Swagger, and other components. I recently secured the application using Microsoft’s MSAL library. Now, I’m going to show you how to enable user authentication in Swagger using Microsoft Identity.

In this post, I’m going to walk through how you authenticate and use an API that is secured with Azure Active Directory using React Native and the Microsoft Identity library.

Hello, Microsoft identity platform!

We’re pleased to announce the release of ReSharper 2025.3 in sync with .NET 10, continuing our tradition of releases that deliver day-one support for the newest C# language features. This version b