< Disclaimer >Even though I will not be able to share the 100% techie stuffs over my blog due to NDA reasons, here are some updates nevertheless for users who read my blog. < /Disclaimer >
I just came home after a 4 day's Asia MVP Regional Summit. It was a general welcome on the first day and we had some unique chance to meet some Program Managers from MS. Nice to see the Program Unit Managers open to hearing our feedbacks. And I must admit. They have been all ears to our voice and I did notice this from the previous MVP Global Summit too ... Thanks guys ...
As usual we had the executive day filled with loads and loads of MS executives on stage. Just to list some of them Sean O'Driscoll (SR. Global Director, MVP & Technical Community), Cally Ko (Regional Director, MVP & Technical Community), Manish Sinha (Asia Pacific Customer Support Services, General Manager) and many others. I must admit openly that the energy and enthusiasm Sean brings to the stage is amazing. I enjoyed his each and every minute on stage. Hey something worth mentioning is at the end of the presentation Sean had a slide with contained our B.NET Bash Photo's :). Here is was I could capture, not sure to how visible that is.
We had just about 5-6 MVP's in SQL Server and out of the 9 Sessions scheduled on the Server track only two were of interest to me. Even though I didn't get big time chance to gain knowledge I had some nice opportunity to engage with people and the Product Group Managers. Here are the two photo's of the SQL MVP's. I think Mahesh Prakriya (Group Program Manager, SQL Server CLR) and Kamal Hathi (Product Unit Manager, SQL Server - Data Warehouse) had good time with us. I did manage to give them some constructive feedbacks about the product. And why not, we all share the same passion - SQL Server :).
I think I need to give space to the SQL Server MVP's I met at the summit. Sukdev was interesting person to meet as I did see him at the Global Summit but never got a chance to talk in detail. He owns a training company called Avantus Training Tte Ltd. He also runs the Singapore IT Pro Usergroup for SQL Server and we had a couple of points to share about our Usergroups too :). Next interesting person was Grant Paisley and Mary. It was fun to talk with these Aussie MVP's as they were very open and were very concentrated in specific SQL Server vertical. Like Grant is a Analysis Services guy and runs his own company called Angry Koala. The moment I saw his visiting card it just got registered in my mind ... Interesting company name aint it ...
The Indian MVP's were showing our Unity and we all around to take snaps every now and then like the one here ... I also had a chance to meet the MVP Lead for SQL Server, ASP.NET, IIS ... He is Ben Miller. You can see us together for a snap with Abhisek Kant (India, CPM).
I also got an opportunity to meet up with Bernard Cheah (MVP, IIS) at the venue. The best part was I got introduced to him from Colt Kwong as an Intel Employee :). Thanks Colt for the favor. It was nice to find an MVP inside Intel apart from me too. Couple of months back he featured at the MVP Insider where I got to know him. But I think MVP Asia Summit help me find a good energetic guy who is passionate about technology (esp IIS for him :)). So here is a snap of us with Akila Manian. Just for people interested more about him can visit his blog here.
There were some interesting site seeing that we went for including the Singapore Zoo's Night Safari, cool Jurong Birds park shows, Sim Lim Mall and many more. Apart from that we also had some cool evening party, dance performances, magic shows and some interesting fire works to watch out ...
I know you will be disappointed if you wanted some techie content. But I cannot write much guys on that :). So you can catch all the pix from here. For some strange reasons I am not able to watch them as a gallery. You can change the page name till 159.aspx to view them all. I think Bryant will be able to do something about it ...