So on Thursday afternoon, I picked up a beautiful new iPad 16gb WiFi. As an avid iPhone user, I find the device to be everything I expected, and used it all day Friday happily. On Saturday night, technically Sunday morning, I was leaving the home of my brother after a night of playing poker, and drove out of his driveway with the iPad on the roof of my Suburban. My drive was 5 minutes of city streets, and somewhere along the way, on a road I was going about 30 miles per hour on, my iPad took the plunge. Now, of course, I didn’t notice this at the time. So it fell into the roadway and I drove on. When I finally realized it was missing when I got home, I called my brother who went out from his place, we met in the middle and he found it in the road for me. The iPad had been in a black Belkin neoprene case I had purchased for my Kindle DX while I waited for Amazon to deliver my Speck CandyShell case, and the zipper was now ruined, so my brother left the tearing open of the case to me. What did I find inside, after a 5 foot fall going 30 mph and then (as I would soon discover) having been run over by another car? Here are the photos… As you can see, clearly the device was run over, likely while laying glass-down in the case on the road, by a vehicle. The device though continues to work PERFECTLY. The screen has two areas showing some extra brightness where I suspect it is being pressed on from the rear, but despite this incredible event that I would have expected most devices to have been destroyed by, the iPad came through a little worse for wear but otherwise unscathed. The sides of the aluminum case are puckering away from the screen slightly, and the corners are roughed up a bit, but overall it came through amazingly well. Thank you Apple for a quality product, and saving me from being killed by my wife when she heard about this event.
I’m thrilled to announce that registration is open for Dallas TechFest 2010 at http://dallastechfest.eventbrite.com Who is speaking you ask? Well our incredible team of web volunteers are hard at work on a refresh of our website, but in the meantime, here are some names and topics from the .NET Track: ASP.NET MVC 2 and Azure Table Storage - Chander Dhall Particle Physics Engine in Silverlight and ASP-mvc?! - Amir Rajan The Rich Standard: Getting Familiar with HTML 5 - Todd Anglin Hard Lessons Learned From Being Stupid About TDD - Matt Hinze Intro To Generics 0 to 60 - Devlin Liles M-V-V-M in Silverlight 4 - Caleb Jenkins Unit Testing SharePoint using TypeMock - Kyle Kelin 10 Practices every developer should start right now - Caleb Jenkins Monotouch for the iPhone - Casey Watson Dropping ACID: Building Scalable Systems That Work - Chris Patterson Silverlight, SharePoint, iPhone, HTML5, as you can see we’ve got a packed schedule of .NET goodness … and that’s not to mention the Flex, ColdFusion, PHP, and Java tracks!
Every year Microsoft hosts an event they refer to as the MVP Global Summit in the Seattle area. This event is invitation only event where those who have been recognized as Microsoft MVPs get to meet with their product groups, discuss strategy, impart real-world scenarios, and learn what is coming down the pipe. The event is simply wonderful, where else can you get a chance to interact with the people directly responsible for parts of the Microsoft eco-system you care about most deeply. Of course, such openness does not come without restriction. The MVPs are all under a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) which means that for 90%+ of what we are told, we cannot discuss it with other people. You can’t discuss it? Why go then?! A fair question, with at least four answers. So let’s go through them. First – I can’t discuss things, but I still know them. When thinking about the trip to the Summit you must remember that you’re learning things far before the public will, but that does not mean that the public will never learn these things. Much of what is discussed will eventually become public information, and once it is those who have been to the Summit will have had the most time to internalize and strategize on the information, often meaning they will be able to act on that information more quickly. Also just because I can’t share my knowledge does not mean I can’t share my judgment. I can use the information I have received to inform the choices I make for my own personal work and what I do for my clients. Second – Meet the Team Every Summit is a chance to meet new people within Microsoft who are working on your area of expertise and interest, to put a face with a name, and to collect business cards or email aliases. This can be wonderful later on if you want to provide feedback or ask a short question during the 99% of the year that isn’t the MVP Summit. Third – Bond with your Local MVPs When you travel to the MVP Summit you get a chance to spend time strengthening your relationships with the MVPs in your area. Your local MVPs are the backbone of your community, and getting to know them better will help you help your community better. You’ve got time during the Summit to discuss plans for future events, eat, drink and be merry. Fourth – Meet MVPs from around the world… This may seem like a repeat of the entry above, but meeting MVPs from outside your local area has a different purpose. Your making connections that open up an exchange of ideas. You’re putting names with faces from Twitter, Facebook, StackOverflow and other sites. You never know when a passing conversation about your interest with some technology might not result in you being able to help a company half way around the world make a wiser technical decision. Absolutely key. Again, eat, drink and be merry. Conclusion Rather obviously a lot of what the MVP Summit is about is networking, but you’re and MVP right? You network, help people, organize meetings, answer questions, in general you are a community leader, and influencer. And so are ALL of those other MVPs. Even if every MVP touched merely as many people as a small user group, say 50/month people, then the 1400 MVPs who just left the Summit in 2010 represent 840,000 developer touches. And those numbers are low. From blog posts, to conferences, and more an MVP has huge reach … which is why we were invited to begin with. Thank you to Microsoft, the Product Groups, the Developer Evangelists, and the incredible MVP Leads for making this Summit a smashing success!
