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:

• MVP Summit 2011: Meet C++ MVPs Angel, PJ, Tom and Sheng
• Talkin’ C++ with Kate Gregory

Looking forward for the next summit experience.

We are seven MVPs from Romania. Here is a picture from yesterday dinner.

And this time VictorN, Marc G and myself.

We had a lot of fun!

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.

Here is a picture taking from my room at the North Tower of Westin Hotel.

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.

A very simple sample provided by Don Box and Anders Hejlsberg in their article “The LINQ Project” at MSDN (http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa479865.aspx) shows a query on objects in C#:

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);
  }
}

BURKE
FRANK
DAVID

• 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.

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.

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.