Remember there is still a second contest that does not end until next Friday. Check out the original post for all the information. The competition is still wide open!

Best of luck and congratulations to Marc!!!

This hopefully goes without saying (Yes, I am saying it), but these licenses are not for resale. They have unique, traceable keys. Please enter the contests only if you really need the software and plan to give back to the community in some way as a result of winning.

Here are some things not included in these licenses, which would be available with a paid MSDN Ultimate subscription: MSDN Magazine, support calls, Office 2010 licenses.

Update: Office 2010 licenses are included for development and test purposes only.

Contest number one is simple. Send me an email at alashcraft [at] gmail [dot] com and explain (honestly) why you need the subscription and what you plan to do with the tools. Keep in mind that this is all about community. I will choose the winner based on need and community influence. I must receive your entry by Friday, July 9 at 8:00am EDT (UTC – 4) and will announce the winner at 12pm that same day.

For the second contest, I want to make things a little more challenging. Email me a .NET-related technical article to be published on alvinashcraft.com as a guest post. The content must be original, written by the submitter, and not available on any other web sites or blogs. Please include a short bio for yourself as well. All must should be emailed to alashcraft [at] gmail [dot] com, and they must be received no later than Friday, July 16 at 8:00am EDT (UTC – 4). I will select the winner that weekend and announce the winner on Monday, July 19th. If I receive an overwhelming number of great articles, I may dig up some smaller prizes for 2nd and 3rd place (probably books). The winning post will be published the week of the 19th.

I will do my best to scan my spam folder for entries, but please try not to mention Viagra, cheap meds, free Photoshop software or foreign bank accounts in your emails to me.

Any attempts to shamelessly promote my blog or Twitter account will have no effect on the outcome of the contests but are welcome nonetheless. 

If you have any questions, leave a comment, email me, or send me a reply on Twitter.

Sorry for the unexpected days off. I’ll be back in full swing tomorrow.

Alvin

Monday:

• Arrive at SEATAC – 2:30pm
• Party with Palermo – 7pm-10pm

Tuesday:

• MVP Summit TweetUP / First Time MVPs Meetup – 7:30pm-9:30pm
• Insiders Party by Infragistics – 8pm-10pm
• Hoping to check out later: 1st Annual Tellago MVP Party – 8pm-12am

Wednesday:

• Solutions Architect: Product Group Evening Event – 6pm-8pm
• MVP Summit 2010 Edition @ Chez Neward – 6pm-10pm

Thursday:

• Attendee Party – 7pm-11:30pm

Friday:

• Need to be home for family commitment. Shuttle to SEATAC pickup at 10:40am.

Send me a DM on Twitter or email me if you would like my mobile number to call or text me next week.

I want to send out a thank you to Scott Mitchell for including The Morning Dew in the Blogs of Note section of his Toolbox column. I was surprised to see my name when I opened the June 2009 issue of MSDN Magazine last night. The section highlighted two link blogs, this one and Chris Alcock’s The Morning Brew. Chris does a great job on his daily posts, including a nice summary of each link as well.

Thanks to all my readers/subscribers too!

The Windows 7 Release Candidate (RC) just hit my MSDN Subscriber Downloads RSS feed. Go forth and download!

MSDN

The advertising network, The Lounge, is conducting a survey of the readers of blogs and podcasts that host their ads. Two random survey participants will win copies of all of Manning’s In Action books (41 of them). If you would like to take the survey, it is available here.

Thanks!

Alvin

Wow! I hope that email in my inbox is not some kind of elaborate April Fool’s Day hoax. 

It’s an amazing honor to receive this award. I would like to thank Dani, Lindsay, my new MVP Lead Miha Kralj, and everyone who considers my blog a valuable resource. I will do my best to live up to the MVP status by becoming more involved in the .NET community. To start, I will be doing a talk on S#arp Architecture at Philly.NET Code Camp 2009.1 on April 18th. Be sure to come on out if you can! There is a great lineup of speakers and sessions.

I hope to see many of you at the next MVP Summit!

If you haven’t seen the fitness contest that Caleb Jenkins has put together, you still have a little time. To get started, check out the Official Rules and join the Facebook group.

My official starting weight is 211 lbs. Here’s a picture I took of the scale while standing on it this morning:

Good luck to all!

Are you or anyone know interested in reviewing some Refcardz?

DZone has over 40 titles, and coming up soon they are going to have Tapestry, BPM, SharePoint, WPF, SOA Governance, Core ASP.NET, ASP.NET MVC, HTML, and more. Just join the mailing list and review the ones that look interesting. The mailing list is here:  http://lists.dzone.com/mailman/listinfo/refcardz-review.

Contact me if you have any questions.