The Microsoft Connect Event in Nice was amazing. There where approximately 80 attendees from more than 20 countries. I got a chance to speak to so many interesting and skilled people. I traveled with the people behind some of the local .NET User Groups and Petter Schatvet from Microsoft Norway. We arrived at the amazing Four Season Hotel Monday evening. The welcome reception was held at the clubhouse in connection to the golf course at the hotel. It was a nice start of a great event, and the entire evening was spent talking to the attendees and getting new connections.
The evening activities Tuesday started with two hours of outdoor activates before we had to take a 45 minute buss drive to a medieval inspired restaurant. The restaurant was amazing, and the food was great. Inside they had a stable separated from the restaurant with a glass wall. You could look directly into the stable where they had a small pony, some goats, rabbits and a guinea pig.
In addition to connecting to new people Microsoft had put together an interesting program. On Tuesday Alexander Holy and Hans Varbeeck gave a presentation on security from Microsofts perspective. Rafal Lukawiecki gave an amazing presentation on “Holistic Security”. Clements Vasters gave a nice introduction to the Windows Communications Foundation. His newtellivision application looks amazing. I’m defiantly going to download the code and play around with it.
Alex Taylor, from Microsoft Research in Cambridge, wrapped up the second day of content with a presentation of “Surface Ecologies in the Home”. Basically he talked about how we organize everyday items in hour homes, and how a computer not necessarily lets us organize content the same way. He also showed up some really cool demos from their research apartment. One of the demos was a “digital bole”, where you could throw your phone or camera into. What ever media content you had available on your device got projected onto the walls of the bole.
All in all it was a great event! Thanks to Microsoft for inviting, and to all the great people I meet during three fantastic days in Nice, France!
I’ve uploaded my pictures from the event to my Flickr page.