The MVP Global Summit 2011 took place in Redmond and Bellevue at the beginning of March. This year I attended for the fifth time, and as usual it was a great time. Fellow MVPs, discussions with the Microsoft product groups, parties, everything made it worth it. And this year it was also a little bit special because I was named C++ MVP of the Year, a distinction shared with Kate Gregory. A 3rd C++ MVP, Sheng Jiang, was also named MVP of the Year as top answerer in the MSDN forums. As an MVP of the Year I was invited to attend a dinner held by S. Somasegar, senior vice president of the Developer Division at Microsoft, where I joined the other MVPs of the year in the awarded categories (such as C#, VB, ASP.NET, etc.), but also top figures from Microsoft, such as Scott Guthrie, Jason Zander, Anders Hejlsberg or Scott Hanselman and the Microsoft community leads. This is a picture from the event, showing, from left to right, Sheng Jiang, myself, Diego Dagum – Windows C++ community PM, and Kate Gregory.
Another special moment at this summit was being interviewed by Charles Torre for channel9. He did several interviews with C++ MVPs and these interviews were posted on channel9 recently. Here you can find the original post for the interview with Alon Fliess, Bruno Boucard, Jim Berveridge and myself. We talked mostly about C++, but also the MVP program.
The other interviews that I mentioned can be found here:
The MVP Global Summit 2009 is talking place between 1 -4 March in Seattle and Redmond. Its going to be over 700 sessions during these 4 days. Last two years it was really good and it will probably be the same this time too. I’ll be mostly focused on sessions with the Visual C++ team about the new features in Visual Studio 2010.
We are seven MVPs from Romania. Here is a picture from yesterday dinner.
Finally I managed to scan some printed pictures from Seattle. During the party at the Experience Music Project, some of us had some fun on stage. Here is the proof of performing “We Will Rock You” on stage. From left to right, ovidiucucu, gstercken, Marc G, me, VictorN and Brad.
The MVP Global Summit ended today. It has been a great week here at Seattle and Redmond. There were 1753 MVPs present at the summit and 1000 Microsoft employees from the product developing teams were involved in the event, delivering presentations, talking about the things they do for the next versions of their products and, most important, taking a lot of feedback from the MVPs. Personally, I spent two days with the Visual C++ team, and the feeling among the MVPs there was great. In the past there has been some frustration among us about the quality of VC++, but now we have a good feeling that things will change and VC++ will retake its place and lead, at least to some extent, the innovations deliver by Microsoft.
Here are some pictures from the summit.
The flags at Microsoft Convention Center…
Welcoming the MVPs…
Group picture…
CodeGuru MVPs together with Korean MVPs…
Canadian group picture…
The battle between Newsgroups and Forums…
CodeGuru group picture…
That’s it for this year summit. Looking forward for the next one.
Today starts the MVP Global Summit in Seattle and at Microsoft’s campus in Redmond. I have arrived yesterday in Seattle, one day later than planned because I lost my connection flight in New York. At least after spending the second part of Saturday waiting in lines (one hour at the Customs, two hours waiting at Delta’s counters for a rebook, 45 minutes at the hotel for checking-in, and at least 30 minutes at the restaurant to get a table to eat) I traveled to Seattle at business class. I already met some friends here, from Romania and Germany and I’m looking forward to meet the others and take part at the sessions planned for this summit.
Here is a picture taking from my room at the North Tower of Westin Hotel.
I have decided to select and post several more pictures from the summit.
In the first you can see Bill Gates delivering his keynote on March 13 to a group of 1700 MVPs from 95 countries.
Just after Bill Gates’ speech, the Canadians gathered for a group picture, all wearing jerseys of their national hockey team.
Don Box and Chris Anderson had a read funny and interesting presentation about modeling. Here you can see them getting questions from the audience.
Just before departing from the Microsoft campus on Thursday, remaining MVPs from CG decided to have a group photo. From left to right: John Czopowik, Brad Jones, me, Guido Stercken-Sorrenti, Siddhartha Rao and Raymond Hawco.
Last, but not least, the Romanian flag, seized among other 94 flags at the Microsoft Conference Center.
Anders Hejlsberg, creator of Turbo Pascal and C#, delivered a great presentation on LINQ on Tuesday. This was actually my first contact with LINQ (which stands for Language INtegrated Query), but it makes me envy the C# and VB.NET programmers, because these are the only two languages that support it. LINQ defines a set of general-purpose standard query operators that allow traversal, filter, and projection operations to be expressed in a direct yet declarative way in any .NET-based programming language. It basically introduces SQL-like queries as first citizens of C# and VB.NET.
using System;
using System.Query;
using System.Collections.Generic;
class app {
static void Main() {
string[] names = { "Burke", "Connor", "Frank",
"Everett", "Albert", "George",
"Harris", "David" };
IEnumerable expr = from s in names
where s.Length == 5
orderby s
select s.ToUpper();
foreach (string item in expr)
Console.WriteLine(item);
}
}
The output of the program being:
BURKE
FRANK
DAVID
Procedural languages, that express both what to do and how to do, have reached a point where there is nothing more to enhance. Removing the "how" part of the equation seems to be the next direction in the development of such languages. One of these cases is represented by the LINQ project, which simply makes C# and VB.NET more powerful.
On Monday 12, I have successfully made contact with several fellow MVPs from CodeGuru:
Brad Jones, the site manager
John Czopowik
Alin Negru, a fellow Romanian, that used to live in the same city and work at the same company as I, but now lives in Canada
Raymond Hawco aka Arjay., who is actually from Seattle
Below is a picture with us: from left to right you can see: Brad Jones, Guido Stercken-Sorrenti, Siddhartha Rao, me and Raymond Hawco.
I also met Aurelian Popa, an ASP.NET MVP from Romania. Of course these are just a few of name of all the people I made contact so far. It was great however to finally see the faces or meet the people behind the avatars you see online, and get to learn how those people actually are, beyond the impression you make based on a virtual indentity of that person. And so far an very impressed with everyone. It’s great to be here.
Yesterday I had the chance to see the city from the observation deck of the Seattle Needle, 500 feet above the ground. Fortunatelly the weather cleared just in time to have a good view over the entire city. However, the wind on the side with to the gulf is so strong, you can hardly breath.
I also visited the SF Museum, that exibits manuscripts, books, comics, costumes, weapons or robots from movies. I have seen there the hand and skull of robot Terminator, from the movie Terminator 2, tricorder and phases from Star Trek, the tunic wore by William Shatner as the captain of the first Enterprise ship, his chair and the auto-destruction deck, the light sabers used by Mark Hamil as Luke Skywalker in Star Wars: A New Hope and David Prowse as Darth Vader in Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, or the loader machine used by Sigourney Weaver as Lt. Ripley in Aliens when fighting with the alien queen. It was very interesting to see all that stuff put altogether.
At the Science Museum I had the chance to meet scientists involved in a project of monitoring the ice at the Arctic. They presented the work they do there, asking people questions and showing the tools they use. That allowed me to get inside of one of the tents they used during one expedition.
As for yesterday evening I have successfully made contact with Siddhartha Rao and Guido Stercken, fellow MVPs from GodeGuru, and both from Germany. I’m looking forward to meeting all the others today.
Several hours ago I have arrived in Seattle for the MVP global summit, 26 hours after leaving my home city, Timisoara. Weather is rainy here and my PDA cell phone doesn’t seem to work. I have already met a fellow MVP, David Portas, from England. I’m looking forward to meeting the other MVPs, especially those I already know only from on-line activities.
I set up my agenda for the summit, with Thuesday focused on Vista development and Wednesday and Thursday on VisualC++ topics. I’m pretty sure Ill have very interesting days ahead. I will post here info about the hot topics at the summit.
