Microsoft Student Partner Event - MS London

This weekend was the second Microsoft Student Partner event, and boy was it a lot of fun. Consider yourselves warned, this is likely to be a long one.

Social Event

This Sunday was the social part of the second event for us MSPs and we really were in for a treat for the entire night. After getting a bit lost at Euston station (I was looking for the underground, not realising it was in the same building as the train station) I got to Edgeware road pretty quickly and stepped out of the station facing London's Hilton Metropole hotel - very convenient.

The Hilton
The Hilton was, obviously a gorgeous hotel (especially compared to some of the hotels a short distance away) but I'd expected a bit more from such a top-name brand. They didn't even provide any toiletries for me to bring home and give away as birthday presents to girls I don't like very much. The minibar was a fairly impressive system though, it charged as soon as any item inside it was moved, using a fairly complicated looking array of sensors. I'll admit I was tempted to go for an Indiana Jones moment, but we all know how that one ended for Indie..

Anyhow, the hotel room was going to be the least fun of the night, so I was soon off downstairs to meet the rest of the MSPs. We hadn't arranged a definite meeting point, but it wasn't hard to find them, I just looked around for the nearest bar. There should be some great snaps of me and Fernando in evil villain/world domination chairs - I'll post them when they're uploaded.

Namco Station
At about 6pm we set off for Namco Station, which is in County hall, just next to tower bridge. MS had booked the lower half of the station for us, so we had a nice leather seating area, a bunch of arcade machines and a few bowling alleys for our pleasure. They'd also ordered food for 30 (I believe only 21 of us went), which was lovely - and drink for...well, it must have been for about a hundred or so, because we didn't use up the bar tab until 4 hours in. All the arcade machines were paid for too :)

Matt Duffin (the technical evangelist) took on all comers at DDR - I used to think I was quite good until I played him, although we both managed to fail the song when we put on some insane dance track and nearly broke our legs. The bumper cars were faster than usual and caused much merriment, possibly helped by the tipsy state we arrived at them in. Bowling was fun, I had one good game (129) before the alcohol kicked in, but it didn't get any less enjoyable. The highlight of the night in terms of arcade machines was probably playing House Of The Dead III with Matt, and trying to predict the 'storyline'.

The Hilton (again)
After meandering through London, taking many pictures, most of which involved at least one of the Microsoft signs we'd taken from Namco, we eventually got back to the hotel bar. I popped up to my room for 10 minutes to put my jacket away, and by the time I got back to the bar some of the other MSPs had found a couple of American girls to chat up. Well, to be more precise, they'd found one American girl, and her stepmother. Details are sketchy, but there's photos of some of the guys in the Americans' room, and I know the mother was getting on very well with Grant Downie. We'll have to wait for the pictures on that one I think.

Didn't manage to get any sleep on the Sunday night, because I'd somehow taken everyone seriously when they suggested a 6am swim in the hotel pool. Only Matt turned up though, but the others missed out in my opinion. There was a lovely pool (mirrored ceiling == win), a steam room and a real sauna, which gave us a real appetite for breakfast. Hilton breakfast was naturally awesome, I've seen butchers with less meat out on display.

Vista/Office launch event

Awake and refreshed (ahem), we set off was a great event, held at the MS London offices. These seemed pretty cool, everyone was nice and laid-back but it didn't have the vibrant energy of the TVP campus in Reading, though that could have been just because it's tiny in comparison.

Darren Strange started off by chatting to us about our Office 2007 presentation, and how we can answer some pretty difficult questions that might come up. Learnt some cool new things there - most impressive was the fact that the Office 12 Word extension (.docx) is saved as xml (and I thought the x was just for show) - so I plan on seeing what cool things I can do with that now. The xml's inside a zip, which might be a little annoying to code around, but I'll let you know.

Next up was Matt McSpirit who gave us a talk on Vista. As we're all running it, we didn't need too much coaching, but I found a few features in Ultimate that I've not had in Business edition - the DVD maker is unbelievable, you can make a pro looking 1080p DVD in literally seconds.

Finally we got a really good grounding in how to present WPF from Mark Johnston, although I imagine I'm going to have a less techie audience so I'll probably stray from there. I'm loving WPF, although I haven't dabbled with XAML yet, and along with Blend I can see it becoming a really great tool to designer/developer interaction. Learnt some sweet new stuff too, but that's covered under the Non-Disclosure Agreement I'm under. I'll let you know as soon as I can though.

Finally we got a great presentation skills lecture (far better than anything I've learnt at Uni, or elsewhere) from Eileen Brown - an Exchange Server techie with a ton of presenting experience. I was confident presenting before, but now I've got some more slick tricks up my sleeve.

After a bunch of discussions about the MSP scheme, and moving on next year, we got the goodies. My Vista Launch pack should arrive soon, which will be jam packed with great stuff, but here's the highlights of what I got on the day:

Vista Ultimate
Office 2007 Home and Student Edition
6 t-shirts (3 types)
Thinking putty

and of course, a bunch more silly little things beside.

I then had to wait an extra hour once I got to the station because my ticket wasn't valid during peak hours, during which I discovered that I've possibly worked with the Birmingham MSP (Paul Kiddie, who, I forgot to mention, gave us a presentation on his Imagine Cup entry, which looks like it may take off commercially, given luck and more hard work) back at McDonald's in Cardiff, many years ago. Needless to say, once I got home, I was straight in bed.

As soon as people start uploading the pictures, I'll get them up for you! :)