On 17th January 2004 there was a MVP Regional Summit in Chicago... Around 30+ MVPs from across US had come down for this event which happened in 'W' Central Chicago Hotel, Chicago...
MVP Summits have recently started occurring in US and the main agenda of the same was interaction between Microsoft Team, which is dedicated to community and Microsoft MVPs who too are closely associated with community...
Lots of the stuff that happened in the summit is covered under Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) of Microsoft with MVPs so I shall not be able to write much but still I shall jot down some salient points of the summit which are outside the perview of NDA...
Well!! quite a few celebrated people had come down from Microsoft for the summit, to name a few of them would be Sean O'Driscoll, Director, MVP & Community; Ricardo Wanger, Regional Manager USA; Mike Hernandez, VSTO Team; Emily Freet, Program Manager, Academic Communities; Ben Miller, MVP Lead ASP.Net; Jacob Cynamon, Developer Community; Vinny Pasceri, Longhorn Team; Martin Holladay, ADS Team; Brad Rhodes, Yuknon Team; Mike Sampson, Office MVP Lead; Brian Boston, Windows Client MVP Lead
John Buscher, Windows Server MVP Lead & also "The Host" of the Summit; And Susan Leiter, MVP Program Event Coordinator... (Thanks Brain for filing up the list... !!)
The major technical sessions which happened were:
1.) Session on Automated Deployment Services (ADS) by Martin Holladay
2.) Session on Windows Roadmap & Longhorn by Vinny Pasceri
3.) Session on Visual Studio Tools for Office by Mike Hernandez
4.) Session on Data Story for Whidbey by Brad Rhodes
A believe me all the above sessions were very useful... I could not relate to ADS a lot as its not my area but I am sure that those who were related must have found it pretty useful... About the next three sessions, I had heard about longhorn and Yukon a lot earlier in TechEds and other Microsoft Events in India but here it was much free environment, you see the best analogy would be a college class and a personal tution :-)
But the VSTO part was the most catchy to me... I nearly feel in love with that product and would love to work in something like that, to enhance it to its best and make it a favorite product of many... I surely suggest you to read about it wherever possible... I would had filled up the whole blog with info about it but ususal MS stuff THE NDA... :-) Anyways, sometime soon when it will be worth mentioning I definitely shall...
Now about the best times of the meet... The fun part... We had a nice lunch discussion with Sean & Ricardo, where we talked about the MVP Program, the way it is and the way it should be etc... It was really nice to learn that Sean and Ricardo were actually in a very receptive mode... When it comes to technology I can relate what will fall into NDA and what will not, in such informal discussions its nearly impossible to predict so I better not tell more... India MVPs if you want to know more do drop in a mail and I shall write specially to you, but in short it was a nice long close to 2+ hours session...
We also had a nice social evening where all of us could get together and have some good time... Wish I could upload pictures on my blog...
I also met with Jacob Cynamon from Developer Community... got really pally with him, hope we shall work closely in the time to come and do something useful... Got an oppoutunity to talk again with Ben, who always reminds me of Deepak, my India MVP Lead.. Both Deepak and Ben are full of energy and enthusiam... Thats what comprises of a MVP lead perhaps... I also got to spend some time with Emilly and discuss about my ideas of community model, hope so that such a wonderful discussion will ultimately yeild into something, I need to do some homework here... And ya one good progress was talk with Andrew Flick the Student Ambassador to Microsoft from Bradly University, Peoria, IL... I believe Andrew can join hands to work for growth of .Net Community & groups like .Net-BUG
Last but not the least was drink and dine which I had together with Vinny, Ricardo, Mike, Dian & Greg Chapman (Great MVPs)... That time will be one of the most cherished time for me to remember... I learn that all those Techhie guys out there are actually musicians and above all very nice human beings...
Moral of the story: Regional Summit was amazing, fun & learn experience and I shall look forward to more of those types in the future...
-Vishal Joshi
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