Most Valuable Professional 2026

Wednesday July 15th 2026 I got an email from Microsoft, “You’ve been accepted to the Microsoft MVP Program!”. The Microsoft Most Valuable Professional award is given to people like me who contribute a lot to open-source, speak at conferences, write documentation or help others use various Microsoft technologies.

Check out my MVP profile

Categories

As a nominee (new or for renewal), you’re required to keep a list of all your contributions. Each contribution has to be categorized. So as a nominee you have a say in which category(/categories) you might be considered for.

Security

You can find various articles on managed identities and security in general. This blog (now with working search 😉), is one of the reasons why I got nominated in the beginning.

.NET (new)

This year is the first time I’m also recognized in the .NET category. As an organizer of .NET Zuid and developer of various open-source projects (mostly build in .NET), I felt it was time to focus my contributions on these areas.

Microsoft Graph (old 👋)

Professionally I am still doing a lot with the Microsoft everything api. I even have Wintuner (a PowerShell module to package and upload apps to Intune). And I’m experimenting with BetterGraph again a PowerShell module that tries to be faster then to official PowerShell module.

You can only submit your contributions for two categories, so I had to make a choice. And .NET is just a better fit. This does not mean you won’t be seeing graph content here.

Under the covers

After submitting all my contributions the wait started, it seems nobody knows how the process goes exactly. Or they are not allowed to tell you. You can ask me everything about the mvp program, but this part I cannot explain, simply because I don’t know.

The waiting ended on July 15th 2026 at 17:01 CEST, with a message in my mail that I’m accepted in the MVP program. 🎉 Congratulations to all other MVPs and I hope to meet all of you at any of the conferences still to come or at the MVP Summit 2024