MVP Summit 2008
This week was the MVP summit in Redmond. Around 2,000 MVP’s were invited to come to Redmond to meet with the different product teams and to learn, engage, discuss, and give feedback. This year, for the first time, some of the summit was done in an OpenSpace fashion. While some people were very critical, most everyone, found it a great experience. The advantage of using open space was, that the attendees were able to define the focus of discussions. Furthermore, the OpenSpace format encouraged more of a two way discussion, rather than a presentation style meeting. All product groups presented what they are doing and what they are planning to do. I do not want to go into detail of each of the session, but would want to highlight the following session I attended:
· OpenSpace on why the MVP Architecture award was stopped. To give a little context, the MVP architect award was discontinued by Microsoft in February and every MVP in that category was asked to select a product category in which he would want to continue his/her MVP status (I chose client app dev.). This caused a lot of discussion on the mailing list about the message Microsoft is sending (e.g. Architecture is not important). The discussion on the list did result in a new conversation about how architects could work with Microsoft even though they are not working with a particular technology. Anyways, Simon Guest was the host to lead the discussion with a group of 30 x-architect MVPs. The discussion were focusing around how a community around architects could be interfacing with Microsoft for mutual benefit. The action items identified were Identifying how to recognize architects (MVP, RD or other program) and providing a process (and tools) on the Microsoft side and the commitment of the x-MVP’s to define topics to work on within this new community. First results how this will look like should be available in May.
· Visual Studio Rosario (architecture skew) : The April CTP was shown. It will be interesting to see what the future of the tools will look like in regards to Software Factories, and Guidance. All modeling languages provided are based on the DSL tools and some innovative new diagrams will be included. I will definitely install the April CTP of the tools and explore more……
· Keynotes by SteveB and Ray Ozzy: These sessions were mainly Q&A sessions, even though SteveB was (as usual) very energetic and working the crowd.
The major take away points I got from the discussions were:
1. We as ISV Evangelists should be present at such an event. By talking to 1 MVP we can touch many developers. Especially initiatives such as Facebook and other community efforts would be great to advertise in such an environment.
2. Involving developers with local events is a good platform to reach out. While online involvement is certainly important, the responses I got from MVP folks at the event was that local events are a necessary complement to the online activities to achieve a high degree of “satisfaction”.
3. The new architecture initiative will be a very interesting place to interact with MVP’s and perhaps RDs (still to be decided). I am definitely planning on staying in touch with this community and will actively contribute.
4. VSTS and TFS around Rosario and Oslo are very interesting technologies which fit very nicely with my background in Software Factories. I will try to ramp up expertise in those areas.
BTW I just published an article on MSDN https://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc496679.aspx
5. Microsoft is an exciting place to be J