The summit was absolutely great.
We had some terrible issues with transportation but the time spent with the DS guys was outstanding. There were problems they were thinking about and working on that never occurred to me in the scope of the new features such as RODCs and stoppable/restartable AD that you may have heard Stuart Kwan (of the Ottawa Kwans) talking about at DEC or some other tech forum. Obviously I can not speak to a lot of what was said other than to say we have some very bright people figuring out some very difficult questions for us and I am proud to have met them (or saw them again) and talked to them. At one point, Nathan Muggli was up talking about Longhorn which featured A LOT of two-way discussion and questions and that session ran really long. We were told we were at break time because we had been sitting for quite a long time and anyone that wanted could go take a break – everyone (and I mean every single MVP in the room) turned their eyes back to the front and said keep going…
We got a demo of an actual Longhorn DC running Server Core (previously Server Foundation). Those of you who have known my vocal outcries of get IE off of my servers in every single forum I am involved in will know how much that made me smile.
I will possibly write some various blogs over the next few weeks about some specific conversations I had with different MVPs and others that isn’t in the NDA realm. There were many good discussions. One was a debate I had in Jillian’s pool hall with Jimmy “The Swede” Anderson[1] Friday on what MONAD is really going to do, not technically, but to the world of admins and scripting.
I hope Stuart gets better. He was practically falling over dead coughing up in front of everyone but just kept plugging away. Later I said, Stuart, you should be home, not here. His response was, no way was I missing seeing you guys.
Oh I finally got to meet Dmitri Gavrilov in person. I was quite excited by that as I have been looking forward to it for some time. Dmitri has been extremely helpful to me personally and to many AD users in the newsgroups. I don’t know what I was expecting but when I saw Dmitri what I saw wasn’t it but now it seems just right. If I saw him on a street somewhere I never would have guessed. He went down to a pool hall in Belltown with some of us and shot pool and talked tech all night on Thursday, it was great.
I, along with Brian Desmond, probably one of the luckiest[2] and definitely one of the brightest, youngest, and most experienced IT PRO MVPs had burgers at a sports bar with ~Eric and Brett Shirley. ~Eric was great as ever and I have now supplied him with an official joeware T-shirt which I understand he totally wore to Saturday’s festivities (which I had to miss unfortunately). I did that as a simple way of saying thanks to ~Eric for all the help he has provided to me over the last year to 18 months or so.
Now Brett, I don’t know if he would even wear a joeware shirt. He had quite an interesting shirt himself, it was a shirt with a picture of himself on it. Now, there aren’t many people I know in the world that can pull that off, Brett just happens to be one of them. Brett put it best when he said People call me incorrigible, they only do that when they can’t help liking you. Or something to that effect. I was at a bit of a disadvantage when he said it because I had been shown his office and was trying to recover from the experience.
Of course, I also got to hang out with many of my MVP friends and meet f2f some other MVPs. It is odd how you can see someone maybe once or twice a year tops yet get together with them like you saw them just a few days ago. That is the feeling I get with many of the MVPs[3]. Unfortunately MS had us split up between Seattle and Bellevue so I didn’t get to spend as much time with all of the different MVPs I wanted to but it was still good to get together with everyone.
Oh, Iain McDonald was of course great. Iain has about the best accent and attitude of just about anyone you can meet. In fact, as I type this I hear it in Iain’s voice, I wish I had that accent, it is a fun accent. My friend DeanWells says I shouldn’t do accents though. Anyway… there are a lot of great speakers at MS like steveB and Stuart Kwan but Iain, he is in a class by himself, it is just fun to listen to him and you never know what he is going to say. He loves the stuff he is doing and has fun with it and it just oozes out of him. On top of all of that, he is a realist, he knows when things aren’t working and isn’t afraid to say it. There was a dinner on thursday and everyone was packed into a cafe drinking and carousing while speakers were trying to present – the speakers would try to speak louder and the crowd would get much louder until you can’t hear anything but a ringing sound in your ears. Iain looked at it, realized it wasn’t working and put a stop to it and told folks where they could find the presenters if the MVPs wanted to talk to them. Had Iain stood up there with a beer in his hand and just started spouting his thoughts, I am quite sure the place would have settled down and listened. All I have to say is that with how open and honest he is about things, there is some hope for me continuing on without being completely politically correct.
This summit was both better and worse than last year. Last year logistics was just great and this year it seemed very poorly planned or it was very poorly executed. Last year you got this great feeling of well “Microsoft is great” that was kind of puffy and cotton candy like you get after you see a motivational speaker. This year, the time I spent with the DS guys gave you good solid nuts and bolts feeling of MS is great. I am sure experiences varied, but I am not here writing about other’s experiences, if you want to read that, see them. 🙂
joe
[1] Really here
[2] How many 16-17 year olds do you know getting to play with HP SuperDomes? If he plays his cards right, he is bright enough to be exceedingly wealthy and retired by 30.
[3] Though some of the other MVPs quite frankly just plain scare me to death and some just make me laugh. One in particular had the cahones to stand up in the executive session and tell Jim Allchin he gets an F for not fixing mailbox storage issues in Outlook Express. Jim was quite nice, my response would have been…. “Hmmm, I have a solution, we will integrate the NNTP functionality into Outlook and remove Outlook Express from the OS…”. I am sure Jim wasn’t overly worried, but from what I saw at the summit and from what I have seen out of MS in the last few years, the work Jim (and of course all of the Windows folks) is doing with making the base platform better gets an A or better.
