I am starting 2008 very relaxed this year since I still have another week of leave left. However it seems that around me a lot of people are starting early and keeping people informed on what is happening. Microsoft also completed it's selection of the First Quarter MVP's for 2008, and as previously mentioned Craig Nicholson joins the list of 17 existing South African MVP's as X-Box MVP. I finally caved in and got myself an X-Box 360 late last year and I must I am truly impressed with it. I am hoping that X-Box Live will soon be available in South Africa since the content it offers is just brilliant. To find out how my X-Box is doing feel free to visit his blog over at 360 Voice.

Two local MVP's, Willy-Peter Schaub and Hilton Giesenhow has already been blog crazy and posted some neat new Microsoft Tips on their blog over at DotNet.Org. Willy-Peter discussed some new errors found in VSTFS as well as how to reset permissions on Remote Desktop. Hilton discussed a great method to Inject a Page Base class into ASP.Net pages, a very useful function he demonstrated at Tech-Ed 2007, and Virtual Tech-Ed also published the latest interview with him regarding WCF, one of Hilton's favourite subjects. The creator of SubText, Phil Haack, also finished his move to Seattle where he is joining Microsoft, and over Christmas also completed a new CodePlex project called Subkismet. He's also been posting some interesting entries about Collections Initializes. I was amused coming across a Developer Standoff between him and Scott Hanselman, with most votes going to Phil. These are two individuals I regard as peers just based on the amount of work they do for Developers worldwide, and definitely people to keep following in the future.

I'm currently enjoying my time catching up on everything I haven't been able to do last year, and also playing with some new toys, including the HTC P4350 and Apple MacBook. SA Developer.Net KZN is also promising to be extremely active in KZN this coming year and plans are being finalised in the next 3 weeks for the years schedule. With Microsoft preparing for the launch of all the 2008 products at the end of February the next few months is bound to be an interesting one.