What is the Microsoft MVP Summit? MVP Summit 2019 Overview

Before we start with the Summit part I’m sure some of you might be wondering what is a Microsoft MVP? MVP stands for a Most Valuable Professional. The Microsoft MVP program is an award based system for technology professionals primarily in the Microsoft space. It’s awarded to people who contribute heavily to the community and Microsoft products, there’s many ways that people can contribute to the community including speaking, blogging, open source contributions, product feedbacks, helping at conferences and more. You can find out more on the https://mvp.microsoft.com/en-US/pages/what-it-takes-to-be-an-mvp

The MVP Summit is a event organised by Microsoft for MVPs. It allows for MVPs to connect directly with Microsoft product teams, give feedback and see what the future for different Microsoft products is. The MVP Summit 2019 sessions were held around the Microsoft campus in Redmond with most MVPs staying in Bellevue.

At the MVP summit Microsoft product teams normally announce future roadmap for products, aiming for feedback from the MVP’s. The majority of the news is NDA and if you leak any NDA content there’s serious repercussions including loss of MVP award. Unfortunately this year there has been some sightings of leeks around the campus.

At the moment XAM Consulting has two Microsoft MVPs, myself Michael Ridland and Bryan Anthony Garcia both of us attended.

What did I learn at MVP Summit? The area’s of interest for myself are Cognitive Services, .NET, Xamarin and Serverless. I cannot tell you the exact details but this years news around Xamarin and the future of Xamarin was fantastic, the whole community is energized and excited, it’s great to see the continued investment in Xamarin. I can say that it will continue to be the Gold Standard for cross platform mobile development. While the ‘shiny toy’ aspect of Xamarin has gone the platform and it’s approach is still unparalleled in the mobile space. My second big interest at MVP summit was serverless this primarily focused around Azure Functions and Event Grid, with the Azure Functions roadmap I can say that it will continue to be a market leading product in the serverless space.

A little bit of swag and stickers are up for grabs also.

The best part of MVP Summit is the people, MVP Summit allows you to re-connect with old friends and make new friends, these friends are both other MVPs and Microsoft Employees. The ‘Hallway’ track as they call it, is a great chance to both learn new things, plan new things and maybe vent a few things.

A little side perk of MVP summit is that (most likely) an overseas trip and it’s a good chance to get some tourist stuff done, so I recommend you allow time for some tourist stuff.

This year on Thursday night I stayed in downtown Seattle did a few tourist things including:

Seattle Underground Tour

I can see why it’s the top rated thing to do in Seattle, it’s fascinating to know that Seattle’s streets and roads are all level with the second story of the buildings. What does that mean? Well after the great Seattle fire of 1889, in which the entire business district of Seattle burnt down, all the buildings that were built with entry doors on the ground level and second level of the building and the road and sidewalk was raised 1 story (building by building). Thus leaving an entire city that’s underground, under the roads and sidewalks.

Seattle Underground Tour

Future of Flight Aviation Center & Boeing Tour

I also got time to do the Boeing Factory tour, which as you can imagine is mind blowing. The factory has enough indoor floor space to fit the whole of Disneyland inside it. We got to see the factories where they assembled the 747, 787 and 777.