Microsoft Student Partners

What it is?

The Student Daze MSP Summit 08 is the first of what will be an annual event to bring together the top MSPs at the Microsoft HQ in Remond, WA. MSPs from each of the 13 regions meet for 2 intense days to help shape the MSP program for the year to come. Up to 4 MSPs from each region are flown to Redmond to make a group of around 50 MSPs.

Day 0

I flew from Perth and met Edmund (Sydney Uni MSP) and Andrew (Australian ADE) in Sydney going onto to San Francisco and then Seattle. The flight was especially long for me coming from Perth, but the Qantas service was good and we arrived safe and sound.

We have been put up in The Westin Bellevue which is across the road from the Microsoft Bellevue office and a couple of minutes away from the main Redmond campus.

Across the road from MS

Luke & Ed at Dinner on Day 0

Day 1

Everyone met bright and early in the hotel lobby. We were taken to the main campus where we were served a hot breakfast of scrambled eggs, potato cubes, sausages, bacon and fruit along with coffee of course. We all got given forms to sign, little bags full of goodies, access to the Microsoft Guest internet access and passes.

mm coffee

First up was Sam Gazitt who did a presentation on Popfly. Most of the MSPs were pretty up-to-date on Popfly so brushed over some of his presentation and showed us some cool demos.

Sam showing off Popfly

Blogging @ MSFT

Australian Frank Arrigo headed up a panel of bloggers including Jeff Sandquist, Major Nelson, Twitter Maven. It was excellent to hear from these guys about what blogging means in this age and to a company like Microsoft. We heard a bit of policy stuff on Microsoft blogging, which allows their employees to blog and voice their opinions quite freely. Twitter came up and it was decided it was also just as important as traditional blogging. Jeff seemed to really like FriendFeed.

The blogging Panel

Open Source Software at Microsoft

A whole session on open source at Microsoft. Karri tooks us through a whole bunch of stuff as to what projects Microsoft are involved in and a bit about the Open Source Lab (an actual physical lab) at Microsoft dedicated to improving interop. Craig Wicks, a member of the OSS team was super interesting, as he gave his take on what it is like to actually work on open source at Microsoft on the IronRuby team.

Lunch

We were all given $14 each to spend at the Microsoft Cafe in the next building. Edmund and I shared a salad as I think our stomachs were still on Australian time. There was heaps to choose from though.

Live Mesh

One of my personal favourite sessions of the Summit. Jeff Hansen from the Live Mesh team came to talk to us about all the cool things happening in Mesh and Cloud Computing. Some of the stuff is under NDA but what I can say is that PDC will be huge! Lots of stuff happening.

XNA Community Games

Dave Mitchell from the Xbox team came and talked about XNA Game Studio and the Xbox Live Community Games program. We got a sneak preview at the new Xbox UI (which is very cool) and some avatars. He talked about developing community games and how they are published through the Live Community Games program.

Company Store

All session’d out, we got out of the room and went to visit the Microsoft company store. We each got given $80 to spend at the company store! How generous Leandro, thanks!

put to good useThe MS ECompanyStore

House of the Future

We took the MS Shuttle to the house of the future. Very very very cool. We visited the Microsoft Executive Briefing Center and got a tour around the House of the Future. Unfortunately we weren’t allowed to take pictures. Basically there were lots and lots of displays and lots and lots of RFID

free candy in the MS shuttles

Party and Xbox 360 comp

Pizza, beer, lots of Xbox’s, Rockband… a big party at the MS office in Bellevue. All the MSPs, speakers and some of the Xbox dev team were there.

Day 2

Joe Wilson

Joe Wilson is the Worldwide Director for DPE at Microsoft. He came and had a casual chat with us about the big picture and how MSPs and Microsoft fit into it.

Scott Guthrie’s Keynote

The highlight for most MSPs of the event, Scott Guthrie who also won the best presenter for the event, picked some topics directly from us and talked on them. Silverlight, cloud computing and WPF were some of the topics talked about, as well as some upcoming stuff that we can’t blog about…

MSPs with Scott

MSP Discussion

We had a discussion with Jen about the MSP program, what we liked and what we wanted improved as a kind of precursor to the workshop after lunch on shaping the program for the upcoming year.

Lunch

Lunch was with more lunch vouchers at another Microsoft Cafe.

Having lunch

Workshop

We did a lighting session to get ideas to improve the MSP program. We then ranked them and split into 3 groups to work on the top 3. Each group looked at the problem, worked on a solution and had to do a presentation at the end.

coming up with ideas

Astoria 2 / SQL

Pablo Castro gave a talk on Astoria. It was very cool as it is also related to some of the Live Mesh technologies. Basically Astoria allows you to interact with data using traditional HTTP POSTs and GETs.

Cloud Computing

David Lemphers, also an aussie talked about cloud computing from the infrastructure point of view. He basically went through how to build a cloud computing service from the data centre up. It was amazing looking at what actually goes into providing a cloud computing service.

Jobs at Microsoft

Carrie Read, who I’ve met personally quite a few times and who is such a great person did a presentation on Jobs at Microsoft and internships.

Andre Furtado

Andre is an Ex-MSP, a serial finalist in the Imagine Cup and now a Microsoft employee in Redmond. He talked about his experiences from being involved with the MSP program, Imagine Cup and gave us some tips for working at Microsoft.

Party at Lucky Strike

The private bar and bowling alley at Lucky Strike in Bellevue was hired out for our closing party. We had dinner and drinks, bowling and lots of Rockband on the big screen.

Edmund with the girls

Playing Rockband

Summary

Student Daze was an awesome experience, meeting MSPs from all over the world, and helping to shape the future of the program. We had tons of fun, and if you are an MSP, it’s definately something you should work towards achieving.

Luke
UWA MSP