Over the weekend I hit a Windows Azure issue in my side project that totally blocked me. Yesterday, I reached out on Twitter, and the Canadian MVP network picked it up and helped me solve it in 30 minutes.

You can see the full conversation here

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I know that this isn’t special to a lot of people. When we have issues with code, products, or whatever, social media comes to the rescue with help.

This is different.

This is my network that is shared with the the world. I’m an MVP in Internet Explorer because of my work in the HTML space. Tyler is an MVP in Windows Azure. D’Arcy is an MVP in ASP.NET.

All of us are local and know each other, but the fact that I could reach out and D’Arcy highlights it, and Tyler comes to the rescue to review my code on Github and find a solution is awesome.

Plus, he even apologizes (how Canadian, am I right?) about not responding over the weekend.

It’s not awesome just because the problem was solved. It’s awesome because of the level of expertise available to me to solve a problem on a side project. It’s awesome because a “consult” to do that same sort of thing would have taken a long time to sort out, rather than a 30 minute set of tweets back and forth.

It’s awesome, because I got helped because they wanted to help, not because they had to.

I realize that this is sort of patting my team on the back, but I thought I should take a moment to reflect on how amazing the Canadian MVP network has been to me over the years, and hopefully in the years to come.

Ask Tyler for help on Windows Azure here on Twitter and here on the web. You can ping D’Arcy on ASP.NET/IIS and all things technology here on Twitter and here on his blog.

Thanks for playing. ~ DW