Shoutbox

Hello everybody,

almost 4 months have past since the release of Messenger Plus! Live 4.01. Life kept me pretty busy during the summer, everybody seemed quite happy with the last release and it seemed that Microsoft was not in a hurry to distribute a new version of their Messenger client so everything stayed quiet. Everything? Well, almost… .

Many of you probably followed the events that occurred after Microsoft gave me an MVP award for the year 2007: many things were said on many web sites and, because I also have a private life to attend to, I didn’t feel it was necessary for me to respond to any of them. A lot of people also showed their support which means a lot to me, and there was no point in continuing to argue forever. That being said, there’s one thing I wanted to clarify, seeing that some individuals may have misinterpreted the last actions Microsoft took over this matter: many people seem to think that my MVP award was revoked which isn’t what actually happened. What did happen was that my active MVP status was revoked (for reasons you may or may not agree on) and yes, there is a big difference there. To quote Microsoft, the award itself was given to me "on the basis of his technical expertise and strong community contribution" and that’s just not something that you can take back. I have now received my MVP certificate as well as all the associated gifts like every other MVP, I’m still very proud of it, and I’m happily continuing my relationship with the Windows Live Messenger team. So, what does this revocation mean? Just that I won’t be able to log-in into MVP-only newsgroups anymore this year, or display the MVP logo every time I write a blog somewhere. So as you can see, that’s no big deal, no big deal at all, the recognition itself is what matters .

Now that this is out of the way, let’s talk about what’s coming next. Messenger Plus! 4.10 is on the doorstep, every translation has been updated and internal beta testers are making sure one last time that this version is ready for primetime. I’m also preparing a new contest around scripts to celebrate the first million of scripts downloaded from this site so if you’re a script developer, make sure you don’t miss the new version! Many things have been done to improve the scripting interface and seeing how popular scripts already are, in addition to the gifts I’m preparing for the contest, you’d better make sure that your scripts are up to date!

Stay tuned for this weekend’s release!
Patchou