[From France] It's been a busy week
Yes, a very busy week indeed. It started on Monday, with the "ISV Strategy Day" where Microsoft France invited about 150 persons from local ISVs to present for a strategic briefing. My manager asked me to be his demo man, so I did some demos on Biztalk Server 2004, SQL Server Reporting Services, Office System 2003 extensibility through the Research Libraries with a partner solution, a parter solution integrated in Reporting Services, and the demos ended with the CaseBuilder application, running on longhorn and taking advantage of Avalon, as shown during the PDC03.
On tuesday, we had a half day of conference with a partner ISV called Invensys about "Plant Intelligence". More than 100 attendees. My director had a keynote and I attended and was on the Microsoft booth. In the afternoon, going to practice my demos and retrain on my session for the day after.
On wednesday, there was the Microsoft 64-Bits Technology Tour in Paris, called "Route 64". A full day of presentations and demos of Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, and SQL Server and .NET running on Intel Itanium 2 machines and those nice AMD64 powered Compaq laptops. I presented the session on Writing .NET applications for the 64-Bits platform. high level attendees, high level questions as well. And yes, I'm very lucky: I have one of those nice AMD64 powered laptops loaded with an internal pre-version of the 64-Bits CLR and 64-Bits Whidbey. Very interresting the kind of things we can discover by hacking this around. Will publish some notes later.
On thursday, I had another Biztalk Server 2004 presentation. In English this time. Quite a difficult exercice. And on the evening, we had our first "MSDN Subscribers Only" event. The colleagues from my team presented the new features in Visual Studio 2005 and .NET 2.0 during two hours. Then we had a lunch and there was four round tables for an "Ask The Expert" session. This event was a great success. We plan to do more of this kind. I had a lot of interresting contacts. For instance, I met Jacob Navia, the author of the free C compiler LCC-Win32. Smart people. The last attendees left at 11:00 PM ;-) What a day ...
On Friday? I had a chance to go to my office, to do my business as usual. I like those moments when you can stop for a couple of minutes to think and relax.
Yes, as Renaud mentions it : I'm alive and kicking ;-)