North America Trip - MVP Summit 2015



In fact the best compliment I received was along the lines of, “Dave, we thought you already were an MVP!”
Monday morning things started in earnest with well-organised buses providing transport from our hotels to Microsoft’s Redmond campus. And ‘campus’ is a good term as it is in many ways like a University campus. Microsoft almost takes up the whole of the suburb of Redmond. I only got to see a tiny part of it, but I was very impressed with what I saw. A beautiful location with impressive buildings, landscaping, gardens and playing fields.

You aren’t meant to take photos inside, but I can show a few outside shots I took on an early morning walk around part of the campus.



Because more and more of Microsoft’s ASP.NET development (and .NET in general) is now being done as open-source on Github, many of the sessions I took part in were not under NDA. Look out for recordings of these on MSDN’s Channel 9 soon.
Not surprisingly, the Summit is a bit of a “who’s who” of Microsoft technologies – there were a lot of names I recognised from blogs that I follow, or who I’ve heard on various podcasts over the years. The nice thing is that all the “big names” that I encountered turn out to be just nice friendly regular people who are more than happy to chat and welcome a “New MVP”. I also made a point of inviting everyone to come and visit Australia (and this was made more enticing by reminding them that NDC Sydney is on next year).

One of the benefits of attending the summit is direct contact with product teams. Both giving feedback but also being able to pick their brains. Thursday was ‘hackathon day’. I know I was really encouraged from meeting the Glimpse developers Anthony and Nik and getting some feedback on an open source Glimpse plugin I’m working on.
And at the end of Thursday afternoon, that was the end of the summit. A final bus ride back to the hotel at Bellevue for my last night in Seattle.
Written on November 17, 2015