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

Final report: Academic Community Launch

In the last 4 weeks we three Microsoft Student Partners (one even Senior Student Partner), Alex, Mario and me, did the Academic Community Launch in Austria.

The idea was to visit a lot of the universities in Austria and do the something similar as the launch events (Heroes happen here, anybody) that Microsoft held in the different countries around the world.

We also wanted to show them the new technologies (in talks and one workshop) in a from-students-for-students perspective.

This video is a summary of what we did, plus (after minute 9:30) an interview with Alex where he speaks about the organization of such an event and also about what we learned while doing it.

Meet the Microsoft Student Partner girls

At the TechEd’s Microsoft Student Partner evening Will and I were lucky to interview some of the women in the program (if you study computer science you might know how few women are studying with you).

Kateryna Drobotko (from Ukraine), Susana Vilaca (from Portugal) and Diana Tataran (from Romania) talk about their passion for technology and why they joined the Microsoft Student Partner program. We spoke also about what they enjoyed at TechEd and what they are studying on their home universities.

It was very interesting to see why these girls enjoy working with technology and what makes them passionate about it!

Check it out!

Experience student life in Australia! He started something :)

A month ago I have been at the Melbourne University. I don’t want spoil to much but it was like living in a Harry Potter movie (speaking of the housing).

Ed Hooper (an MSP from Australia), Dimaz Pramudya (another MSP who is studying as foreign student in Australia) and Long Zheng (you probably know him from his blog) showed me the campus and we talked about the Microsoft Student Partner program, Long’s blog and studying in Australia.

If you ever wanted to study in Australia you should definitively tune in and listen to what Ed and the other guys tell us about that!

Check it out!

TechEd Barcelona 2007

Tomorrow is the last day before my journey to TechEd. You might think: what you start already on Saturday?

Well, I’m home (home home) right now and to fly to TechEd I need to travel to Vienna first. That means that I need to take the train to Vienna on Saturday. Then sleep in Vienna. Next take the train to the airport, take the airplane, take a cab to the hotel and I’m there. Alexander Duggleby, who has set up his blog a few days ago, is traveling with me. He’s also a Microsoft Student Partner and he’s (also) going to cover TechEd on his blog. I have put “also” in brackets because I don’t really know how much I can cover the TechEd from Barcelona.

First: my notebook’s battery is completely broken. If I put it back in the whole notebook becomes very hot and slow. I learned my lesson with my old notebook; you know the one that burned down: on any sign of strange conditions try to find the cause as soon as possible and remove it.

Second: I’m going to do some work for Channel 8 and as MSP there, which means I’m going to do interviews with some nice people from Microsoft. The results are going to be put on Channel 8 afterwards. Expect some very nice interviews! Some might even be in other languages than English! I’m also going to attend some of the MSP events to socalize with other MSPs and people in general.

Third: I’m going to meet with Charles Torre from Channel 9. He’s a cool guy and I want to spend some time with him. Perhaps follow him a little bit around to see how he’s doing interviews with people etc. I’m really excited to meet him! Another dude I want to meet is Barry Dorrans. He’s also on Channel 9 and seems to be a very cool guy. He’s going to do a session on CardSpace and later on he has some free time where we can meet. Perhaps even Charles and some other niners who are there want to join…

Fourth: I really want to attend a few sessions. I mean TechEd is also here to hear about new exciting stuff that comes from Microsoft… isn’t it?

I hope to find some time to blog with all these activities in mind… Alex told me that they have web terminals there, which means I probably can access my e-mail and my blog. If I find some time I’ll blog about my experience - I’m very excited: first TechEd to come!