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

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.

Synchronizing Data: Inside the Microsoft Sync Framework

A few days ago Charles Torre from Channel 9 shot an awesome interview with a few members (Aaron Greene, Andrei Maksimenka and me) of the Microsoft Sync Framework team. In the video we explain how to get started with the Sync Framework, what the goals of the Sync Framework are and how we are committed to the native and the managed world:

If you have any comments feel free to post them here or go over to the website where the video was published to leave a comment.

So this is what happens at Microsoft…

Yesterday I posted my blog post about Erik not being in his office. And today we had lunch.

What did happen? It seems as if Erik came somehow to notice about my post and found it interesting. In the evening he wrote me an email where he said that I’m going to be more lucky if I walk by today at 11:30am. I did that and we (him, a few members of his team and I) went out for lunch.

It was cool because I had the chance to speak with the person behind Volta, LINQ and many other interesting projects. His team is also very cool and we had fun discussing some of the stuff that goes on inside and outside of Microsoft.

It’s nice to meet the people behind the technologies at Microsoft. I love it

I walked down…

… but Erik Meijer wasn’t there. He is probably out. I will try again in a few days.

My way to work at Microsoft

A few days ago I had the idea of making a photo series of my way to work. The following are the pictures that I took:

Looking back to the appartment.

That’s where the cars park in front of my appartment.

Heading direction main street.

Looking down to the main street that I need to cross.

If you are interested in the full series of me walking to my office you can download it from here.

Flying to Seattle

I took tons of pictures while flying from Innsbruck to Frankfurst and from Frankfurt to Seattle. We crossed the north sea, Greenland, Canada, the Rocky Moutains and finally landed in Seattle. Flying over Greenland was really really awesome. I have never seen so much ice and rocks. The swimming icebergs are only impressive. Canada is also really cool because it looks really empty until you see some big straight streets that cross the whole country… that’s when you understand that people life there.

The best pictures that I took are the following:

The full series of photos is found here.

My first week at Microsoft

… actually not. It’s my second week at Microsoft but the first whole week that I’m at work. Why is that?

The first week at Microsoft you have the so called NEO (New Employee Orientation). This is some kind of introduction to the company and goes on for two days. In fact it is registration (as you know it from Microsoft events), then a few presentations that introduce the company, a really funny legal speech and then get hand out of the blue badges. All food was included.

After the first day at NEO I called my manager to tell him that I had arrived at Microsoft and when I should report in. He was rather relaxed and told me that I could come by after the second day at NEO or the day after. Since I was keen about my office and the team I went by already after the second day of NEO.

So far I have to admit that I like the team and the office. The people at Microsoft are really helping me out with all my (probably questions) that I have. It’s more like a big family…

I had a few meetings where we spoke about features and stuff that I’m going to help them implement and I had also to write a few one pagers. One pagers are called design documents that give a general overview of what features are going to achieve.

Moe, my manager, also told me to write a short sample that uses the Microsoft Sync Framework because he wants that I get used to the APIs before I start to create features and stuff that is based upon that; that makes absolutely sense to me and I’m right now trying to figure out what exactly I’m going to develop.

Next weeks is going to be cool again because we are going more into the details of the different things that I’m going to build and we are going to have a lot more to prototype and test before we get everything going! I’m really looking forward to that!

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