I attended the Microsoft MVP Global Summit 2008 in Seattle and Redmond, Washington last week. Great technology and it is always nice to mingle with 1,700 of my closest übernerd friends. Monday and Thursday we were all together in Seattle's WSCTC for keynotes, general meetings, and Open Spaces sessions. That formed the crunchy outer shell around the dense chewy inner nougat of breakout sessions on Tuesday and Wednesday held at various locations on the Redmond campus.

I attended the Connected Systems Division (CSD) track, where the first session answered one question on everyone's mind, "can we blog/twitter/podcast/text/talk about the track sessions?" There were several answers: no, no, no, no, and no. Okay, we are allowed to say that we were at the MVP Summit in the CSD track, and that we talked about Oslo. And that's it. Here goes:

I went to the MVP Summit and attended the CSD track. We talked about Oslo. It was cool.

Now what else can I talk about? Great Party with Palermo on Sunday evening. On Monday, Sean O'Driscoll, who will be leaving Microsoft shortly, gave a great speech about community. I liked the Open Spaces sessions on Monday afternoon, they were fairly similar in nature to Birds-of-a-Feather sessions that I help run at TechEd and PDC, so I was right at home. Michelle Laroux Bustamante led a WCF discussion, and Roman Kiss talked about his WCF null channel on Code Project. It was great to catch up with Roman on several issues during the Summit. Monday evening I I geeked it up with Sam Gentile and other folks from Neudesic, and then I ducked out of the reception to work on the TechEd BOF sessions.

At Tuesday night's CSD dinner I had the pleasure of dining with Don Box, and then discussing deployment woes and aspirations with Sasha. I was so engrossed in the conversation I didn't realized everyone else had left the restaurant, and sprinted back to the shuttle bus just in time. Wednesday night was the attendee party at the EMP, where I had some fun sharing around my new light-up juggling balls. Lots of geeks juggle.

Thursday we heard keynote sessions and Q&A with Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzy and Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer. Ozzy's keynote was interesting, but I personally felt it missed the mark on being inspiring. In fairness, MVPs are a tough crowd.  Ballmer, by contrast, is a dynamic character on and off the stage, and had some good answers to tough questions. Thursday afternoon I was back on campus for some follow-up CSD sessions about some very exciting technology.

Thursday evening I met up with Australian Regional Director Adam Cogan and we had dinner and discussed versioning for services. Adam was asking all the right questions. How come we don't have any of the right answers? And why aren't they baked into the platform?

Friday the Summit was over, but I had some meetings on campus. While waiting for a public transit bus from Seattle to Redmond, I got an added bonus to my trip: Pat Helland walked up an introduced himself. As luck would have it, that's his daily commute bus. We had a great conversation on the ride in.

All in all, it was a great geek week.