On Thursday last week I attended the UK MVP Day at Microsoft Reading, or TVP as it's generally known (Thames Valley Park is the name of the business park). There's a large global MVP summit every year, but the UK has just started local meetings, so this was an opportunity to meet with MVPs from all over the UK, whose expertise covers everything from Visual C++ to Money. The morning was partly talks about the Partner Program and the MVP program from their respective heads, followed by breakouts. I went to two breakouts presented by Microsoft Research employees, purely because they intrigued me. The first was on improving media over IP networks, which was really interesting. I know a fair bit about IP, having studied it and done network programming way, way back, but this was pretty cool, about how to ease congestion in networks. Interestingly much of the code for this is already in routers such as Cisco ones, and simply needs to be enabled. But, there are no applications using the protocol, so the routers aren't enabled, and the routers aren't enabled because there are no applications. Sigh.
The next talk was on spec#, extensions to C# to enable contracts, including pre and post conditions ad invariants. We also saw how a prototype was being created to use spec# to ease concurrency, and by that I mean the writing of concurrent applications - ie threaded. Compiler conditions can simply be defined to ensure that locks are placed around certain code segments. Very interested stuff.
The final talk of the day was from Eric Rudder, head of Platform and Tools, who was entertaining and very open. He wasn't given much quarter when questions started - we MVPs are an opinionated lot. I asked about CSS2 compliance in IE and he simply said "noted". Sounded very much like it was something he'd been asked before.
All in all an excellent day. Learnt stuff and met some good people. Thanks to Lorna and Vicki for arranging it all.