Report from TechEd – MVP pre-show summit

Sunday before TechEd I represented local evangelists at the TechEd MVP pre-summit.  In addition to meeting several MVPs for the first time, I got a chance to plan new events with key SoCal MVPs (most of whom also lead or actively participate in local User Groups as well) -- James Johnson, Denny Cherry, Mike Vincent, Andrew Karcher, Mark Rosenberg and more attended.

Here are some of the ideas for new types of events that we kicked around – what do think?

1) Give Camp – a weekend coding smack down, to be held at a university, with teams of developers working to create solutions that will benefit non-profits.  Judging, technical resources (i.e. help) from MS and more.  MS did this in Dallas last year with great success.  Also post solutions to CodePlex.  (Later in the week I had dinner with Sara Ford, who runs CodePlex for Microsoft and she thought this was a great idea and agreed to highlight any projects we might produce there.  Also tie this project to James’ NING site - ‘Geeks Without Borders’ to increase reach beyond SoCal.

2) Proctored Hands on Labs with prerequisites – repeating our highly successfully Silverlight 2.0 HOLs last year, with themes of WPF and/ Windows 7 development.  Have a first night (Tues) with lecture, which is also recorded, in case you can’t make it, then the lab night is on Thursdays.  Repeat frequently, host at technical training centers throughout SoCal.

3) geekSpeak guests – I am always looking for interesting new guests for my weekly webcast series (MSDN geekSpeak) and I met several MVPs at this summit who I’ve invited to appear on the show this summer.