Most Valuable Logo

Last week I flew to Seattle to attend the Microsoft MVP 2009 Summit for its selected MVPs (“Most Valuable Professionals”) . Don’t let the fancy name fool you. Although those in attendance are most valuable to Microsoft, and despite what you may have heard, the MVPs are still fed buffet style, and without a team of valets to shine their pocket protectors. And there were pocket protectors everywhere, because the MVP Summit is all about hardcore Microsoft geeks getting face time with the business and technical movers and shakers inside the company.

It’s my second year as an MVP, but this was my first time to attend the summit. More than just a chance to learn about new technology, the conference is a time when key supporters of Microsoft technologies can provide extreme feedback to Microsoft development teams, and vice versa. A lot of that feedback deals with products and features that Microsoft is designing for release over the next several years. Unfortunately for my avid readers, all of the happenings are covered by a Non-Disclosure Agreement. I could tell you what we discussed, but then I would have to have Bill Gates release a jar of mosquitoes on you.

There are approximately 4,200 MVPs worldwide, a large group of “technical community leaders from around the world who are awarded for voluntarily sharing their high quality, real world expertise in offline and online technical communities,” according to the well-crafted verbiage on the MVP web site. About 1,500 of these awardees spent four days at the Microsoft campus and in downtown Seattle talking technical turkey and rubbing elbows with the Big M’s leadership.

My award area is Visual Basic, granting me access to sessions led by program managers in the Server and Tools division. In addition to talking about upcoming releases of Visual Studio, Visual Basic, and C#, I sat in on presentations covering F# (Microsoft’s new functional programming language for .NET), Microsoft Surface (there’s one on display at the downtown Seattle Sheraton Hotel), the Managed Extensibility Framework (or MEF, an API that helps you design plug-ins for your applications), and Silverlight (Microsoft’s Flash-like web-centric application tool).

The half-week culminated in a rousing speech by Steve Ballmer, who stated in no uncertain terms, “I’m a PC.” He’s pretty big on Microsoft. But even more enjoyable than the cheerleading sessions was the ability to meet with other MVPs from around the world. I really enjoyed meeting the Japanese MVPs for Visual Basic, C++, ASP.NET, and C#, though not necessarily in that order. Many of them are members of two key technical support groups in Japan, COMU+ and Wankuma.

If you have time in your busy schedule, I highly recommend that you get selected by Microsoft as an MVP and take part in the annual summits. Not only will you get a front-row seat on some amazing and new technologies, you’ll get to wax rhapsodic about it on your blog.

(Image Credits: Microsoft)