UK MVP Open Day - Reading, September 2006
Well, it's that time of year again when the MVP's from around the UK and Ireland come together for a conference on the MVP program and to network with one another.
On Friday I was up very early for my three and a half hour commute down to Reading from Manchester. The traffic was fantastic, I arrived with plenty of time and even had a chance to chat to a few of the MVP's I know before registration began.
Steve Clayton gave us a fantastic overview of his favorite bits in Vista and made me want to go out and grab a copy again (although I've promised myself I will wait until it hits RTM before splatting my Laptop!). In taking us through Vista Steve pointed out how what I'd previously seen as general metadata being very specifically referred to as Tagging, which is a fantastic term for Microsoft to be using, it will further the cause of tagging on Blogs and sites like Flickr.
It was great to watch Darren Strange talk to us about Office 2007. If you ever get a chance to see Darren speak I'd highly recommend watching him; he's got a beautifully relaxed attitude and enjoys playing with the audience to build up a rapport the kind of which you normally only associate with speakers like Don Box. Darren showed us some of the cool integration features of Office 2007 and sharepoint server.
In the afternoon there was a whole bunch of different technical sessions that provided insights onto a whole range of technologies and topics. I attended a really cool session hosted by the Developer Evangelists here in the UK, Mike Taulty, Mike Ormond, Daniel Moth, Martin Parry and the newest addition to the team, Mark Johnston. (They have a combined RSS feed for their blogs now too which is cool).
After the day's activities we retired to a lakeside hotel where we all got wasted and had a quiz, apparently our team was disqualified for putting down each answer as a combination of one, two or three squares. Team Spang shall avenge it's unfair defeat.
Anywho, it was good to meet up with all the MVP's again, I hope to see them all again soon, they're a good bunch.