Deze week ben ik samen met de Nederlandse MVP's in de Seattle & Redmond voor de MVP Summit 2008. Gedurende 3 dagen worden er honderden sessies georganiseerd met product teams van Microsoft. MVP's zijn MEGA belangrijk voor Microsoft. Zij combineren indepth praktische kennis met een onafhankelijke blik op onze technologie. De feedback die dit oplevert bepaalt mede hoe ons platform zich verder ontwikkeld.
Natuurlijk wordt het "networking" gedeelte tussen de MVP's niet vergeten :-). Gerard Verbrugge speelt wederom de host voor de Nederlanders (en nog een kluitje "Noord Europeanen").
Aanstaande donderdag worden de NL MVP's ontvangen voor een diner in El Gaucho in Seattle... Dit schijnt een goed restaurant te zijn met veel grote stukken vlees. Ik kijk er nu al naar uit....
Meer info over dit evenement is hieronder te vinden :
Tech leaders contribute to the next generation of Microsoft technology innovation.
REDMOND, Wash. — April 14, 2008 — Microsoft Corp. honors its 2008 Most Valuable Professionals (MVPs), a highly select group of experts who represent the best and brightest in technical communities, at the 2008 MVP Global Summit April 14–17 in Seattle at the Washington State Convention and Trade Center and at Microsoft headquarters in Redmond. MVPs are recognized by Microsoft as outstanding leaders who voluntarily share their expertise in technical communities worldwide. MVPs also provide invaluable feedback to Microsoft by serving as early adopters of new technology and assisting in the product design and development processes.
More than 4,000 MVPs worldwide cover 90 different Microsoft technologies in 94 countries. Mirroring the wide range of real-world challenges and applications that MVPs represent, the summit will feature more than 600 technical sessions on topics ranging from enterprise security and virtualization to gaming and digital media.
This year’s summit also marks new leadership for the MVP program, as Toby Richards takes on the role of general manager of Community Support Services for Microsoft. The MVP Global Summit will conclude with closing remarks by Steve Ballmer, Microsoft chief executive officer, and Ray Ozzie, Microsoft chief software architect.
“Microsoft MVPs are an amazing group of individuals,” Richards said. “By sharing their knowledge and experiences and providing objective feedback, MVPs play an integral role in the improvement of Microsoft products, while also helping people solve problems and discover new capabilities. It gives us great pleasure to recognize and thank MVPs for their demonstrated commitment to helping others.”
MVPs drive customer satisfaction through direct interaction with Microsoft users, answering more than 1 million user-group questions annually. They can also directly affect the quality of Microsoft technology and processes through early testing and feedback. MVPs have contributed to the development of almost every recent Microsoft release including Windows Server 2008, Microsoft SQL Server 2008, 2007 Microsoft Office system and Windows Vista. One MVP’s feedback drove substantial performance improvements to Windows Mobile 6.1 and enhancements in the improvement and re-release of the Microsoft Junk E-mail Reporting Tool. In addition, 268 MVPs participated in Windows Home Server Connect programs worldwide.
“The worldwide technical community is growing at such a rapid pace,” Richards said. “Microsoft is privileged to collaborate with exceptional leaders in the world of technology through the MVP program. At this year’s summit we hope to energize these leaders as well as use their independent, objective feedback for the betterment of Microsoft’s products and services.”
About the Microsoft MVP Program
Microsoft began the MVP Awards as a way to recognize members of the general public who devoted their time and technical expertise to helping users in various online technical forums. Over time, the program evolved, and awards are given to members of technical communities worldwide for their contributions to communities including third-party Web sites, user groups, blogs and wikis.
More information about the MVP Award and the 2008 MVPs can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/mvp. More information on Microsoft technical communities can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/communities.
Hello all,
The final release of the Visual C++ 2008 Feature Pack is now available for download. This release provides several exciting features for C++ developers, such as a major update to MFC and an implementation of TR1. These features are fully covered under Microsoft’s standard support policies.
The Feature Pack is available free of charge to any Visual Studio 2008 Standard or above customer. The download can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=D466226B-8DAB-445F-A7B4-448B326C48E7&displaylang=en.
Using the included MFC components, developers can create applications with the “look & feel” of Microsoft’s most popular products – Microsoft Office, Visual Studio and Internet Explorer. Some of the interesting MFC components in the Feature Pack include:
· Office 2007 Ribbon Bar: Ribbon, Pearl, Quick Access Toolbar, Status Bar, etc.
· Office 2003 and XP look: Office-style toolbars and menus, Outlook-style shortcut bar, print preview, live font picker, color picker, etc.
· Visual Studio look: sophisticated docking functionality, auto hide windows, property grids, MDI tabs, tab groups, etc.
· Internet Explorer look: Rebars and task panes
· Vista theme support
· “On the fly” menus and toolbar customization: users can customize the running application through live drag and drop of menu items and toolbar buttons
· Shell management classes: use these classes to enumerate folders, drives and items, browse for folders and more
More information on our new MFC support can be found at the sites below:
MFC documentation & walkthroughs http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb982354.aspx
Quick tour of new MFC functionality http://blogs.msdn.com/vcblog/archive/2007/11/09/quick-tour-of-new-mfc-functionality.aspx
Channel 9: New Updates to MFC http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=355087
TR1 (“Technical Report 1”) is a set of proposed additions to the C++0x standard. Our implementation of TR1 contains a number of important features such as smart pointers, regular expression parsing, containers (tuple, array, unordered set, etc) and sophisticated random number generators.
More information on TR1 can be found at the sites below:
TR1 documentation http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb982198.aspx
What is this TR1 thing? http://blogs.msdn.com/vcblog/archive/2007/12/26/just-what-is-this-tr1-thing.aspx
Q&A on TR1 http://blogs.msdn.com/vcblog/archive/2008/01/08/q-a-on-our-tr1-implementation.aspx
TR1 slide decks (recommended) http://blogs.msdn.com/vcblog/archive/2008/02/22/tr1-slide-decks.aspx
Channel 9: Digging into TR1 http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=385821
If you or your customers have specific questions on the feature pack, please feel to email mfcnext or tr1crew
Thanks,
Visual C++ Development Team