In a few hours time, I’ll be catching a flight to Seattle and then spending the next three days as a guest of Microsoft at the Windows Server 2008 Worldwide Technical Workshop in Redmond. Without wanting to sound like a fanboy (I believe that one of the reasons I was invited is that, in spite of generally being an advocate of Microsoft technologies I’m also critical when they get something wrong – I’d like to hope that the same goes for Apple and the various Linux vendors too), I’m really excited. Not because a suburb of Seattle is top of my list of places to visit (it isn’t) but because I have built my career on implementing Microsoft products and technologies and, even though I work in the Microsoft Practice at a leading IT services company, this invitation has come about in recognition of the work that I put into this blog and am truly honoured to have been invited.

I haven’t dared mention this trip to anyone other than family, close friends and colleagues (just in case something happened that meant I couldn’t go) but I do know that there are several readers of this blog at Microsoft (both in “corp” and in the UK subsidiary) and I’d like to say a big “thank you” to whoever put my name forward.