Delta Engine Blog

The last day of the MVP Summit (Wednesday) was actually quite short, just a couple of keynotes. But since the last few days have been so packed and exciting, it was nice to have some time to finally relax. I also needed that time to finally finish blogging these posts since I lagged several days behind.

Walking over to the Convention Center was the usual 1 minute walk. Initially I was a little confused because there was no brakefast at the hotel, but then I remembered today it will be at the Convention Center.

My breakfast for today. I was kinda late because I slept relatively long, but then again we stayed at the EMP Party to the very end last evening.

Tony Richards got everything started this day too.

The theme of this MVP Summit seemed to be Windows 7 and this stupid "I'm a PC" slogan. We even got some stickers for that. Nick had one of those stickers on his Mac, but that seemed strange too.

As you can see the crowd was very excited about something. Who can guess what is happening next?

Yes, you are correct, Steve Ballmer is coming up and bringing a lot of excitement with him, as usual. Even though Steve just reiterated whats going on at Microsoft, it was fun to watch him present and talk.

The Q&A had to be messed up with stupid questions and giving gifts to Ballmer as usual. But it got even worse in the next talk, which was supposed to be about Visual Studio 2010, but I did not even see a single screenshot of it. Probably have to check out the VS2010 PDC sessions sometime soon again (when the next beta/ctp of VS2010 comes out, hopefully that one is not on a virtual PC, which was just way too slow for me to do anything).

There was a short break between the first two keynotes and the last two keynotes.

Some guy had a T-Shirt explaining Geeks to us, which is helpful to know ^^

In the next keynote we saw a video about a little girl telling us how great VS is. Seems like that Video has been on YouTube for about a year and it does not seem to have been watched much.

After some other "This is coming up" slides Somasegar introduced us to the technical panel, which even included Anders Hejlsberg. But the Q&A just messed everything up again, most people were just asking why VB6 is not supported better or why Fox Pro is not supported. Same procedure as every year. The last talk about Windows Server 2008 RC2 and Hyper-V and other cool virtualization technologies was interesting again.

And thats it, the MVP Summit 2009 is over. In usual tradition all the XNA/DirectX MVPs got together at the last lunch and we even put together 2 tables again, same as last year.
Richard Thomson (on the right) has been a DirectX MVP for a long time and usually has a lot of stories to tell.

Nick Gravelyn and Vicente Cartas Espinel (Spanish XNA MVP) talking.

Even Andy is listening in, which is a very rare sight (him not talking that is).

Catalin Zima and Andy Dunn. After about 2 hours of talking, everyone split up and left the Conference Center. Some of us also went to some side sessions.

I took a couple more pictures in the streets.

And I went to the movies once again after blogging a bit. This time I saw Taken, which is a very action packed movie, that might not much sense in regard of one guy killing 20 people per minute, but the overall story was good and the pace was also quick so it never got any boring.

And finally some pictures of the Seattle Skyscrapers.

Tomorrow morning I will head to the airport and begin my long travel back to Germany. Not really excited about getting back, but at home it is always most comfortable. At Saturday I will also attend the CeBIT 2009 in Hannover, but I will probably make a short post of tomorrow as well. I hope you enjoyed my pictures and reporting so far.