Greetings from the Microsoft MVP Summit, land of NDA, but while I can’t say anything about what has been discussed here I can tell you I’m feeling pretty good about things and I haven’t had to kick any butt yet and the best stuff is still to come so I’m a happy camper here. I did get called ‘Gus’ twice today but I’m not sure if that is good or not, but apparently some folks who matter here know who Gus is and are obviously thinking about him (and they know I’m a Gadgeteer / .NetMF believer).
What I can talk about is the two Gadgeteer Classes that I did in the Microsoft Store in Bellevue while I was here. The first class was on Sunday shortly after I arrived in Bellevue so I was skating on the edge as I was trusting the Store Surfaces would be setup right and ready to go and apparently wishful thinking was not enough so while we had a full class, we didn’t have working computers for everyone so sharing was the name of the game, but we did manage to get the material and device working for everyone so folks were impressed by Gadgeteer. We also had some store clients join in so for example we had two high school kids from their robotics club and they really liked what they saw and wanted a pile more information.
What was really funny was it was a Surface Pro/Book release day so the store was packed and lots of Microsoft employees in buying stuff and I had a number of senior level managers etc ask about Gadgeteer so it was funny to tell them that it was a Microsoft product, as I say Gadgeteer was the one secret that Snowden didn’t get, but we are doing what we can to spread the good word.
I skipped our MVP party Monday night to come over to the store for far too many hours and fixed the Surfaces as I wasn’t going to have a repeat of Sunday and managed to get almost all of them cleaned up and working so Tuesday night’s class went way, way better and we had a pretty much an all MVP crowd tonight (might I say a very international group, I assured the guys from Australia that GHI could ship there) with the usual store clients watching from around the store and again folks were very impressed with Gadgeteer. Pete Brown came by to see how my presentation went as well as his boss, so it was a lot of fun tonight. So I’d have to call this road trip a raging success so far and an increasing number of other stores are now asking for classes.
