Back in February, I had the honor to attend Microsoft’s annual Summit for MVP award winners.  As an award winner we get invited to visit the Redmond campus (and satellite offices around Seattle) for packed week full of good information, the direction that Microsoft is taking and networking events.

There are really two great advantages attendees get by attending the Summit.  One of which I can’t tell you about … seriously!!  Ok, so I’m only partly serious.  There’s quite a bit of content that is covered by the non-disclosure agreement we sign as Award winners.  However there was quite a bit of content that wasn’t covered by NDA.  At a pre-summit event, the languages MVP Award winners were invited to a group discussion on Async.  I took quite a few notes and the discussion went very in-depth including all the way down to the assembly level (what the CPU uses to parse data).

Another great advantage of attending the Summit is the networking opportunities with both the Microsoft product group employees and fellow Awardees.  And I must say, Lucian Wischik is one of the smartest guys I have ever met (http://blogs.msdn.com/b/lucian/).  There are so many Microsoft employees on various product teams.  Ranging from the actual developers of Visual Studio to individual language teams like Visual Basic and my favorite couple Lisa (Feigenbaum) Cohen (http://blogs.msdn.com/b/lisa/) and her husband Shy Cohen (http://shycohen.com/blog/default.htm).

I have to admit though, my two favorite parts of the whole conference is meeting up with my fellow Korean born MVPs and the Attendee Party.  The picture to the right is of Gilbok Lee, CTO at HugeFlow.  As is customary, he brought me several gifts including the face masks of Psy.  Several of my favorite Koreans were there and I always love hanging out afterwards with them.

The Attendee Party was simply amazing.  This year they rented out Century Link field, home to the Seattle Seahawks again.  Amazing food, fireworks, and even a zipline! Several friends were able to join me for the Attendee Party, but I was especially blessed to have my wife there as well.  In one picture below, my friend Jinna and I wanted to see if running back star Marshawn Lynch remembered her from last year (picture with Marshawn in red in 2012).  He still did and there was quite an impression made (picture of Marshawn in the blue cap is 2013).  I even recall someone getting someone else’ number (fortunately we all know Jinna is quite the happily married woman and it was all in fun).

The Brazilians won this year’s award for the loudest clan, but as always it’s a competition between them and the Canadians (see video below).  And then we missed the Japanese guy who dons a dress on for the party, evidently he wasn’t able to come.