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I had a great time at the MVP Summit last week. I got to meet a bunch of people in person that I had only known over email including Michael Smith, Laura Hunter, Al Mulnick, Darren Mar-Elia, Deji Akomolafe, Don Wells, Ulf B. Simon-Weidner, Rich Milburn, Brian Desmond, Carlos Magalhaes, and Joe Kaplan. Then there were all the people I’d met before in person but hadn’t seen in a while including Tony Murray, Sean Deuby, Joe Richards, Dean Wells, Mark Minasi, Kevin Sullivan, and Gil Kirkpatrick.

Microsoft was a good host. Along with free room and meals, they provided bus service between hotels and meeting locations – although some people complained that the waits were really long. I had a car and only took the bus once with no problem.

Wednesday night a group of us including Sean Deuby, Mark Minasi, Darren Mar-Elia, Christa Anderson, and Michael Smith decided to skip the planned event at the football stadium for dinner downtown instead. It was a good time despite the hour or two we spent looking for a bar after dinner that Darren and Christa promised was right around the corner.

The first half of Thursday was for executive presentations and the latter half was Windows Server presentations. The VP of Communities said that over 1500 MVPs were in attendance from 71 countries. I overheard someone say that the MVP Summit is the largest Microsoft user conference hosted in Seattle. There are around 3000 MVPs in total. Steve Balmer presented next. This was my first Balmer experience. I’ve seen a lot of CEOs and executives speak in public before, but none come close to Balmer’s vigor and passion. Balmer will be speaking at MIT later this month so that will give me a chance to see him again. Jim Alchin gave us a demo of Windows Vista and despite my earlier skepticism, some of the new features look very cool. Later in the day I caught a Monad session from Jeffrey Snover. The crowd was very excited by it which makes me continue to think our upcoming Monad book will do well.

Friday was full of meetings with the directory services product group. They are working on some interesting stuff, but nothing too surprising. Friday night they had a “party” at the EMP. I’m very familiar with the Frank Gehry building at MIT (Stata Center), so I wasn’t surprised when I saw the Frank Gehry designed EMP. The food was good and the drinks were flowing. I didn’t stay too long as I had to catch an early flight the next morning.

Overall, it was a good event and worth going to at least once.