Microsoft invites it's MVPs up to Redmond once a year for a technical summit.  This is a global event where the product teams come out to talk with the MVPs for their product.  This has been an excellent event which is wrapping up today, and unfortunately many of the details are covered by Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA).  However, one thing that isn't covered by NDA are our overall impressions of Microsoft's and its plans.  Let me say that the briefing given to all 1500 MVP attendees from Steve Ballmer was great.  Steve accepted questions from the audiance and fielded some rather confrontational questions all without missing a beat.  Similarlly Jim Allchin came out and you could just see the excitement as he demo'd some of the latest and greatest features of Windows Vista.

After the keynotes on the first day we broke into slightly smaller groups where we got briefings on the overall direction of Office or the Visual Studio development suite, or the Windows Server System etc.  These were great overviews before we broke into still smaller groups to meet with out individual product teams on days 2 and 3.  As an MVP for Visual Basic, I joind about 50-100+ other MVPs in the VB track.  There were probably 20 or more members of the VB Team present in the room as well.  The VB Team came out strong, they made it clear that they are interested in convincing those of you who haven't seen the value of .NET to understand just what you are missing out on.  They also made it clear that they aren't in competition with the C# team for features - they are blowing them out of the water.

You see a hint of things to come when you look at the "My" namespace which was delivered with Whidbey.  This namespace is just the start, and no the features aren't a bunch of new namespaces, but a focus on productivity.  If you are a business application developer and you still haven't moved to Visual Basic... well you are starting to fall behind the curve.  The future of VB continues to be focused on developer productivity.  Making it easier then ever for developers to leverage the Microsoft plumbing without needing to write thousands of lines of code.  One of the questions was "If the focus of VB is developer prodcutivity what is the focus of C#?" - the short answer of course is that it's not productivity - at which the room of VB developers laughed.

The great thing about the MVP conference is that it gives those of us who are MVPs that opportunity to see the direction that Microsoft is going as they think about Orcas and the next generation of Visual Studio.  Note, I understand that Dan Appleman has produced an ebook talking about the choice between VB or C# updated for 2005.  I also understand that Dan gives VB a slight edge (details available via his blog at http://www.danappleman.com/index.php?p=27), but let me tell you from sitting in these sessions with the VB team - wow, these guys definitely have a plan for some really cool stuff in the future. (note C# could have almost the same things planned, I don't know as I was in the VB sessions...)

I was also able to arrange to get an opportunity to spend some time with the VSTS team and Noah Coad.  Noah allowed me to join the VSTS MVPs for a brief discussion with some of the program managers and developers for VSTS to talk about what's going on in the current version of VSTS and what they are looking at for the future.  I can assure you that Microsoft has already started working on some of the feedback that people have provided with regards to VSTS.  This is going to be a great suite of tools to make developers more productive moving forward.

Finally I'd like to say Thanks to Ed Hickey and the entire team that worked on setting up and coordinating this event.  Managing 1500 event attendees is never easy and having us spread across the Microsoft campus and several hotels just ups the overall challenge that they faced during this event.