Till today I've been to a number of Technical events and to be honest the ending had always been a bit boring. Most of the good sessions were over, all of the announcements had been made and most of the attendees had gone shopping or to sleep instead of attending.

Well that's not the case with the MVP Summit. The closing sessions were probably what everyone expected I guess. The guys that are taking over from BillG, namely Ray Ozzie and Steve Ballmer shared their vision for the future of IT and let us in on the company's strategy for the years to come. For me this was the first time to see and hear Steve Ballmer live and I must confess that it's something one has to see to believe.

I know I promised to keep you up to date with all the tings going on at the MVP summit and I know I haven't kept my promise, but things have been pretty hectic and I didn't want to miss anything from the sessions. So to make it up here's a set of pictures that will give you a small idea on what went on. After all, a picture speaks a thousand words as they say... ;-)

Stay tuned, more coming...

My first day at Seattle is officially over. The day began with the super Sean O'Driscoll's keynote and continued with a series of open discussion sessions between MVPs.

The first one that I participated was on ASP.Net Webform development and the new MVC framework. From the discussion I realized that a lot of people consider MVC as the future web development technology, one that will eventually replace ASP.Net Webform development. They see those two technologies as opposing one another, while in my opinion MVC Framework is just another tool that developers can take advantage of in order to satisfy specific sets of requirements.

OK, as far as productivity is concerned ASP.NET is currently better than MVC (dragging a GridView in a designer is far easier than hand-coding it in HTML) but I believe that that's something temporary till Microsoft releases the official version of the Framework. On the other hand, some argued that MVC is better since you can can develop web applications that are more Testable, agile and so forth but I believe that that is the case only when you've poorly designed the Webform one. You can build models, Controllers and Views without necessarily using MVC framework by just following some patterns. So the key factor that should guide your decision to choose one over the other should be wether or not you need the full Page lifecycle, event model, Viewstate and so on or just a simpler model to present the data.

Next I followed a discussion on ORM's where a lot of interesting ideas, and tools (like Linq To SQL, IdeaBlade, and Entity framework, were discussed and compared. Unfortunately it wasn't as technical as I expected, so I'm still pretty excited to meat Daniel Simmons tomorrow and discuss various issues with him. And the day closed with the Competency Teams Receptions and Regional Teams launch.

5 hours left, cruising at 33.000 ft over the Atlantic ocean traveling with a speed of 480mph, till I land to N.Y on my way to Seattle. The biggest moment of my professional career has arrived. For me it's a dream coming true.

So for the next 5 days I'm going to get the chance to visit Microsoft's headquarters on Redmond, talk, exchange ideas and thoughts with some very bright people and get to see first hand all the cool new things Microsoft is building as well as what's it like working for Microsoft.

I don't really know how much of this I'm going to be able to share, but I will do my best to report on all the things not covered by the NDA (Non Disclosure Agreement) all us MVPs have signed.

So stay tuned for more updates...

I don't know how many of you played this game at school, with your friend sitting in the same desk, maybe during the Foreign language course eh? It sure brought back some nice memories to me ;-)

Seriously now, JVC, a Euro 2008 sponsor has developed a nice online flash game where you pick one from the participating in the finals team and try to win. Your points are summed with all the others that have chosen the same team and an average is calculated. The team that will have the most points at the end of the game will win the Euroball tournament. So harry up and score 10 goals for Greece as soon as possible ;-)

What a nice way to advertise, still hope this was made with Silverlight...

P.S. You can even win a ticket for the real Euro finals.

It's truly an honor being awarded the distinction of Microsoft MVP in ASP.NET for 2008.

During my 1st year of being an MVP I got to meet and talk with a lot of interesting, smart, dedicated, funny and accomplished developers, attended and participated TechEd 07 (which was one of the greatest events I've seen so far) and I'm going to meet and discuss with Microsoft product groups on this year's MVP Global Summit.

So on my 2nd year of receiving the award, I promise I'll do my best to not remain just as active as last year but engage more in the community through my blogging, speaking, and writing on Software and web development.

Quite a few people came to me on Microsoft's Launch 2008 event, asking me how someone can work with Silverlight to present video content. So in case you haven't already seen it, here is a Screencast, I've put together, showing off a few of Silverlight's features combined with Ajax. Currently it's only available on Greek, sorry for those of you not speaking Greek.

Yesterday Microsoft Hellas officially presented Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008 and SQL Server 2008 in its regional Launch 2008 event hosted at Athenaeum Intercontinental. Although I've been working and testing those products for quite some time now, it was nice listening to Eric Rudder (Senior Vice President Technical Strategy της Microsoft) on Microsoft's strategy for Microsoft Servers and .Net Framework.

I also enjoyed Daniel Moth's speech on Smart Clients and Sync Framework, although I had already seen most of the things he talked about on his screencasts. I believe that Daniel is probably among the best speakers anyone can get and that's probably the reason why the room was so packed I had to attend it standing up.

Finally, I really enjoyed meeting and discussing with a lot of people, all the cool features Microsoft's new products (and especially Visual Studio) bring to developers, as I participated in the Developers "Ask The Experts" booth.