Spending some time with great speakers from Microsoft

I’m posting this as I’m in the same room with Scott Guthrie and he’s answering our questions Oh boy, he’s showing tons and tons of demos and features! And his presentation slides is a notepad text file containing all the points that he wants to cover. That’s a geek. I love it!

You might ask: why is that and who is us?

“Us” is a selection of Microsoft Student Partners from all around the world (like approximately 40). And the reason for that coming together is the first Microsoft Student Partner Summit that has been organized by the leaders of the student partner program, Leandro Doeyo and Jennifer Perret.

Today is already the second day of the summit. Yesterday we had a selection of cool speaker from all Microsoft who gave us insides (and I speak about deep dives into the technology) on different technologies, such as

• Live Mesh: the new cool kid in the town
• OSS: the Microsoft Open Source effort. Yeah, you read right, Microsoft has open source software
• Popfly: and how to create cool games with Popfly.

• Silverlight: oh so much insides
• and tons of other topics.

The most interesting talk yesterday was the panel with bloggers from Microsoft, such as Major Nelson and Jeff Sandquist.

Another great event was the party that we had in the evening yesterday. Imagine the top floor of a skyscraper in Bellevue downtown with view over Seattle and Lake Washington. Tons of Xboxes and cool games, such as Halo 3 (4 on 4), Soul Calibur, Rockband 2 and Lego Batman. Food, drinks and music. It was GREAT! Today we are going to have another party again… let’s see where we end up today

5 interesting things about the Chrome source code

I have been browsing through the Chrome source and found 5 interesting things:

1. One of the tool projects is build in C# - that’s super cool.
2. They seem to create some ActiveX shims for plugins. I wonder if that has been added to support the IE plugin model.
3. The website on debugging has a VB.NET code sample that is apparently used as a makro to enable some kind of debugging features for the Chrome source code.
4. Google reversed some of the IE structures to do importing of settings. There are even comments in the source code who say that specific structures have been reverse engineered.
5. Last but not least: the whole application is build in Visual Studio 2005 and compiles very fine there. Upgrading to Visual Studio 2008 is only a few clicks when opening the solution in Visual Studio 2008.

It seem that Google uses a lot of Microsoft (Visual Studio, VB.NET, C#) technologies to create the Chrome. Quite cool and funny.

What did you find while browsing through the Chrome source code?

The first half of the internship is over

Time flies by… too fast. The first half of my internship here at Microsoft is already over. It feels as if I started yesterday but it has already been 6 weeks that I’m here. One thing is already clear to me: I’m so going to miss Redmond and Microsoft. The team, the challenges, the free sodas, … oh my, I’m going to miss all of them.

So, what happenes after the first half of the internship? Is there something special that’s going on? Glad you asked. During the 6th week at Microsoft you get to do a so called “mid term review”. It is a review against the commitments that my manager and I agreed on when I started the internship. It’s basically a document that contains the commitments and the progress on them (which one are completed, which one are on the way, which one haven’t been started yet).

I had this review on Friday and it went great. My team is happy with what I’m doing and most of my commitments are on track. Some of them are slightly behind the schedule but I guess that’s normal if you do multiple projects and you have a lot of unknowns…

Next week I’m going to have a meeting with my recruiter where we go over the review document and speak about how I like working at Microsoft. She’s going to tell me what Microsoft could offer me, if the rest of the internship goes well too. What I know is that when an intern performs properly Microsoft is going to offer her/him a full time position. I hope that the full time position can be delayed for a while (and the offer doesn’t expire fast) because finishing with the studies is prioerity 1 now! But let’s find out next week.

My dad is also coming to Seattle on Wednesday. I’m going to show him around Seattle and get him a visitor pass to come and visit my office! It is going to be a lot of fun.