MVP Global summit had happened between March 12th- 15th at Seattle with Mr Bill Gates giving the Key Note.It was an amazing experience to listen live to Mr Gates sitting right in the second row:) What was also exciting is to meet all those people whom I admire for there technical skills and community passion but would have just known them by there emailids. So this was a great place to match face with emailid and also interact with technical experts spread across the globe.
SQL Product group Meets were excellent, but i have been feeling miserable since then because everything dicussed around Katmai is under NDA except the name and therefore have not been able to speak or share about it with peers:) Anyways let me wait...however these days Performance Point Server is keeping me busy. On the first day i did attend some cross platform sessions on Visual Studio and also sessions talking about LINQ. It was nice to interact with Soma again and yes i think we can see Click once deployement of VSTO apps in Orcas.
Deployement has been the major issue around application developed around Office. And if that continues then this reason alone is enough to handicap the development that's happening around Office. And i have been facing this since long and the apps have been testing my patience! So if click once is integrated i think this problem would be solved and it's going to be a great time for Office Applications and for the OBA platform stack.
LINQ and sessions around Object Entity model was good but i see a relatively steep learning curve for current database developers who are going to be working with LINQ databases.
Apart from all this the best part was the MVP Regional dinner where different MVPs from APAC had performed on stage. It was simple superb and amazing!
The motto for Indian MVPs was 'Global Peace' . So Venkat, Veer , Hima and myself had performed a shloka(sanskrit verses) recitation along with there English translation by Abhishek. And all this in a Saree and with 15 minutes of prepartion! And after this all the Indian MVPs came on to the stage by waving the National Flags and danced to the tunes of 'Rang De Basanti'. Namratha, Veer and few others were excellent and lots of MVPs from other countries as well joined us during the dance!
Even after the conference, i happened to meet the Atanu banerjee from OBA architecture teams, Ram Ramanathan from SQL Teams and Roby from Performance Point Server teams to understand the roadmap of the respective technologies. It was a nice experience to meet a combination of Technical, business and industry groups in Microsoft and understand things from different perspectives.
There was so much more of fun and technology and I must thank Micrososft and my company Satyam to give me an opportunity to attend this. Would eagerly wait for the next one.
Some of the MVP Global Summit pics can be found here http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/mvpglobalsummit