I'm just about over my jetlag from the MVP summit. It was a great trip, where I got to meet my fellow Irish developer MVP'S (Kieran and Jamie), and we preceded to conform to the traditional Irish heavy drinking stereotype. I also got to meet up with some of the Dotnetnuke coreteam (typical comments on first meeting me included 'I thought you'd be taller' and 'I thought you were a woman'), great to finally put faces to these virtual identities I've got to know over the past few years, though now I've seen Shaun Walker in sandals and shorts I'll find it harder to be as intimidated by our benevolent dictator in future (when I met him and Rick Strahl ,who also favours the hawaiian surfer look in the corridor, various guards were looking on warily wondering how these 2 had got past security).
I'll not bore anyone with the traditional 'i saw cool stuff, but the NDA...' bit, but I'd just like to say that meeting up with the various project teams (especially the VB one) was probably the highlight. Often it's easy to think that Microsoft live in some sort of ivory tower, with future versions of projects rigorously mapped out, and ignore the community at large, but either they're very good actors (or I'm very gullible), as I was consistently impressed with their desire for feedback (good and bad), their honesty in admitting that various ideas/features were hotly debated amongst their own teams (and often their shameless attempts to get you on their side -more than once I was used by 1 dev 'proving' to another that he was right as I agreed with him), and their genuine desire to build better products (ok, I now sound like I've been under the effect of one of Rorys Microsoft-Cyborg-Chip calibration tool , but I was impressed)