This was a cool event organized by Microsoft India for all India MVP's on the 8th and 9th of November. The goal of this meet was to get all the MVP's together so that we could get to know each other and also have some fun!! The agenda was to meet at a local hotel (called Taj West End) and then have some sessions and skills workshop. Post this, we were to visit the new Microsoft facility and meet with Lauri Moore (VP of Support Services, the group that also runs the MVP program). After this official work, we were to go to a place outside of Bangalore and have some fun and this was the best part!
The first day went off quite well and we had some presentation and communication skills workshops. These workshops had us doing some collaborative work and after this we went off to the new facility. The meeting with Laurie Moore went on quite well and although she was hard-pressed for time, she was able to answer quite a lot of questions. Some of the core areas pointed were the inability to touch base with MS folks at Redmond and access to programs that happen in the US at a much earlier phase than in India. Hopefully these issues should be resolved soon.
The break-out place for the next day was called wonder valley, which was situated about 30-40 kms away from Bangalore. Its about 300 acres of forest land in which adventure sports are normally held. We had fun doing rappling (rock climbing), raft building and actually going on it and high wire walking. Towards the end, each one of us was busted and tired and waiting to return home.
Overall, this was a well deserved break and also was a great chance to meet with all the MVP's and know their interests and areas. Hopefully, more such programs will be had in the future.
With all aplomb, I started on the PDC bits of LongHorn after I returned back to India on the 3rd of November. First off, I had to convert the ISO images of LongHorn into CD format and the DVD had versions for the various platforms and I was confused for the X86 set, since there were two ISO images with vague names (pro_xxx and fre_xxx). The documentation also did not mention about what these files were, since they differed in size too. But I took the risk and converted the pro_??? image into a CD and it fit nicely into one single CD. I started the installation post that and everything went well, until I reached the screen where I had to decide on the partition where the installation had to happen. I choose one of my existing partitions and had to click multiple times on the format button before something did happen and the partition was formatted silently in a minute with no progress indication!! But that was OK, and installation continued... for a loooooooooooooooonnnnnnnnnnnggggggggggg time... :-)
The place where I got stuck was in the hardware detection screen and that hung on for around 1.5 hours with no luck. I had to abort the installation by switching off my test machine and maybe I will try the installation again later or wait for a more stable build. But overall, the software does live up to its expection in terms of an Alpha!! :-) I've actually heard conflicting reports about the installation process itself, since some of my other collegues who attended the PDC were able to install the same in their laptops in about 1/2 hour. Maybe my desktop hardware was not in the HCL for LongHorn.