Microsoft MVP Summit 2016

I've been a Microsoft MVP since 2003. I still consider myself basically a C# MVP, but Microsoft has rolled up a lot of developer categories under one umbrella now: Visual Studio and Development Technologies. As you may know, being a Microsoft MVP means helping the community, in my case, the .NET community of developers. I do this with my blog posts and the many questions that I try to answer on the MSDN forums: https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/vstudio/en-US/home.

Many of my readers have probably heard of the annual Summit in which a few thousand MVPs from around the world descend on the Microsoft campus for 4-5 days of geekiness. I have attended every Summit since I've been an MVP. This year's Summit was interesting though ... since Microsoft has gone Open Source with most of .NET's source code, not everything at the Summit this year was under NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreement). It was hard to keep track of what was and what wasn't, so I decided it was easier just to not talk about anything when I got back.

But we *were* told this: that a lot of what we were hearing about at the Summit would become public the following week at the Connect conference in NYC. And so it did ... the conference was streamed live at the time, but the videos are available at https://connectevent.microsoft.com/ ... watch and be amazed!

On the last day that I was at the Summit, I participated in the MVP Hackathon, where we get to write code and explore new features alongside Microsoft engineers. Kinda geeky and fun!  Here's a public link about the event: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/webdev/2016/11/22/mvp-hackathon-2016/  I'm not in the group picture that was taken at the end of the day because I had to leave after lunch (pizza!) to drive home. It's not a long drive (100 miles), but I wanted to get home before dark (and the sun sets early this time of year) ... I really don't like to drive at night. During the Hackathon, I was learning how to write extensions to Visual Studio ... not a new thing, but something that I hadn't done before, so it was new to me. The other people in my group doing extensions wrote some awesome stuff: Nico Vermier, David Gardiner, Cecilia Wiren and Terje Sandstrom. Their stuff is all on GitHub, so take a look at the Hackathon link above and check out some of the great extensions that they wrote. I never finished my extension ... because I had to leave early and didn't really have anything specific in mind that I wanted to accomplish, I just wanted to learn how to do it. I should have finished my experimentation when I got home, but life and work get in the way sometimes. ;)

Happy coding ...