I've been waiting for the latest Irony release the last few days, but luck was not on my side because the good old Roman Ivantsov, who is fearlessly leading the Irony project, was too busy and not able to drop a build yet. But he had a talk at the Lang.NET Symposium 2009 that was going on the last 3 days.

Since I'm starting to write my own DLR language the last few days. I already posted about the DLR and Antlr here, but I switched using Irony together with DLR now, in case you are interested in more links, check out DlrCalculator from the Script.NET guy and the Irony articles on CodeProject.

I will write more about this project when it matures a little bit more, right now I just have a couple of sample projects, lots of unit tests to try stuff out and a very long TODO list and document about what I want to implement. The project itself could go on for a very long time (>1 year). I already attempted to write a language service few years back and got pretty far with the VSSDK, but writing the language itself, the parser, AST generator, etc. was too much work back then. Thankfully with the new cool tools like Irony and the DLR these tasks have become much easier.

Anyway, time to watch some talks from the Lang.NET Symposium 2009, the first batch of videos was just released today, more talks will hopefully follow soon. Thank you very much Microsoft making these available :)

• Direct Link to the Lang.NET Symposium 2009 Talks!

I will start watching the Keynote by Jason Zander - Microsoft,

• then watch C# 4.0 Dynamic by Mads Torgersen - Microsoft,
• Intro to a Visual Studio Language Service by Ted Neward,
• Irony by Roman Ivantsov and
• IronPython Scripting in MS Dynamics by Roman Ivantsov,
• The Visual Studio 2010 Editor by Jack Tilford,
• The Second Life Cloud by Jim Purbrick - Linden Lab and
• then check out the rest of the talks :)

Update: I just heard in the Keynote by Jason Zander that a VS2010 beta release is imminent, very exciting stuff. Finally I can use a beta VS again, VS2008 is getting boring :D

After not sleeping too much since my long day yesterday I headed to the CeBIT 2009 here in Hannover. I was not expecting to see much new innovation, but since I have covered the CeBIT 2008 (My day at the CeBIT 2008), CeBIT 2007 (Impressions from the CeBIT 2007) and CeBIT 2006 (CeBIT 2006 pictures) on this blog (check those blog posts for many more pictures), I did not want to leave out CeBIT 2009 :)


Some flags. The first few halls were pretty boring, many small hardware vendors from Asia, a lot of equipment like keyboards, mouses, memory readers, etc. The only interesting thing was many book reading devices like the Amazon Kindle, but much cheaper and IMO easier to use without all that stupid DRM and restrictions. But buying eBooks at Amazon for the Kindle is still way too expensive, gotta check back in a few years ..


Intel had a whole hall to themselves (hall 22), which they called "Intel Extreme Masters". What a stupid name. This was more or less the e-Sport hall and it was pretty interesting, but way packed with people.


I still do not understand why so many people think it is a good idea to show people playing WoW competitively. It is just boring! Other than that a lot of WarCraft 3 and Counter-Strike could be seen. A friend of mine also told me that StarCraft 2 might be somewhere here to play, but I could not find anything about that.


The big ESL stage. Some guy is playing WarCraft 3 I guess.


The e-Sport player area. I heard that Intel sponsored a price pool of about $ 750k, nice nice.


The next hall was also very full. I was annoyed a bit that everyone walked so slowly.


NVidia and many other graphic hardware vendors were advertising the new GeForce 285, 295 and the cheaper 250 and 240 variants. Still just DirectX 10, where are the DirectX 11 cards so I can try out some crazy tessellation? :)


Some cool cooling equipment to keep everything cooled down. That reminds me that I still have to buy a better cooler for my new i7 at work, the default cooler from Intel just sucks. It is very loud and does not cool very well!


Some guys playing WarCraft 3 and a lot of people watching. I prefer watching VODs on YouTube ^^


Power consumption of servers is going down as well as for desktop PCs and laptops. Not sure why everyone is so excited about it, I never cared much about power consumption because power is cheap anyways. But it is still nice since less power consumption means less heat and more overclocking potential.


Extreme Performance DDR3 Ram from Corsair, costs more than your whole PC ^^ While the numbers seem to be quite high, most benchmarks and reviews tell us over and over again that even the most expensive DDR3 ram modules are not much faster than everything else, which is sad because I think ram should be much faster by now.


At Saturday a lot of shows and free stuff thrown into the crowd prevented me from walking any faster. My brother warned me and told me the first day of the CeBIT is always the best!


A transparent screen. Looked pretty cool and was way big. I guess great use might be advertisement in the future on normal glass surfaces (trains, buildings, etc.).


There were also very cool water screens on the CeBIT:


Some impressions from outside the halls.


After a little snack I headed back into some of the less interesting halls for me.


But after seeing this (are we at a fashion fair?) and getting pretty tired I decided to call it a day and leave the CeBIT.


See you next year on the CeBIT ^^ BTW: Thanks to Microsoft for the CeBIT tickets :)


Wtf? I'm not entering that train!

While it was fun staying in Seattle for a week and meeting all the MVPs and Microsoft people again, I was happy to finally return back home. I missed my computer :D


I took some more random pics of the streets of Seattle.


It took almost 30 minutes until the bus to the airport came, but I still had 3 hours left, more than enough time. I also met up with a German Windows Mobile MVP, which was pretty much pissed about Windows Mobile 6.5, which did not has any new useful features and just can't compete with the iPhone.


As usual, for me it is always fun to take pictures of people taking pictures.


Heading to the Seattle airport.


Arriving at the check-in gates. Still 3 more hours to kill.


Oh no, self-service check-in computers. This will end horribly as usual! This crappy thing did not detect mine or that other MVPs guys passport and due to all the back and forth it takes like 3 times longer just to get the boarding pass. I also only did get the boarding pass for Seattle to Amsterdam, more on that problem later.


I think I saw this crazy thing before last year at the Seattle airport ..


Waiting in line for the security check. Always fun to have some Asian guys in front of you that did not understand the security officer very well and made everything wrong they could do (not taking off their shoes, not keeping their passports in their hands, not removing the laptops from their bags, etc.). But I have to say getting the boarding pass and going to security is taking less time every year. Some guy had a T-Shirt explaining Geeks to us, which is helpful to know ^^


This thing is strange, buy a DVD for $ 5.99 and you can only watch it for a day because the DVD has a protective film on it and once to remove it for watching the DVD will be unusable after a day or two.


After walking around in some shops, but not finding anything useful (no good books or other stuff I wanted), we could finally board the ship, erm, plane. As you can see it was raining outside, same weather conditions as in Amsterdam and Hannover.


Seattle is getting smaller and smaller ..


For most of the flight we could not see much, it was very cloudy in the beginning, then we flew through the night from Thursday to Friday and in the darkness you cannot see anything either (not much going on around the North pol area anyway).


After about 10 hours it got bright again. I could not sleep on the plane as usual. Now it is Friday and we are flying over the UK right now.


And about an hour later we finally landed in Amsterdam, where it was raining too. The airport is really huge, I'm always amazed when landing there.


A last look at the plane that got us here so far.


Now I'm quite confused. I do not have a ticket to Hannover yet and I thought I have to get my luggage and then check-in again for my boarding pass to Hannover. This happened to me few years ago, but I had a lot of time between the flights, not just a little over an hour.


So I headed over to the Luggage Drop off just to find out that all the luggage is transfered to the next flight anyway. I took a closer look at the first boarding pass and on the back there was a little sticker telling me just that. Warg, let's get back to the gates.


But security would not let me through the other way. They said I had to go through Customs, then to the Arrival area, up to the Departure area and then check-in there again, go through security and so on. OK, I did that but in order to get through security you need a boarding pass, which I obviously did not have. So I headed to the self-service check-in area to one of those stupid computers. I tried to get my boarding pass and the computer freaked out. My first attempt was aborted and then I tried it again just to get a random error and the computer telling me I had to go to the custom check-in area. Some guy came and told me to try it once again, same thing happened. Then I had to wait in line for about 25 minutes to finally get my boarding pass from the custom check-in area. But the boarding time to that plane to Hannover was just 5 minutes away and I still had to get to security and then head to that gate. I rushed over there with some girls in front of me at the security gates, which similar to the Asian guys in Seattle did everything wrong they could (not taking off their jewelry, not unpacking their bags, etc.). But I arrived just in time at my gate and got on the bus to the plane. Pooh, this is just too much stress after being awake for 18 hours ..


After about just 1 hour we arrived in Hannover with this little plane. The stewardess was a little bit annoying not letting me hear some music from my mp3 player, because that could crash the plane. Yeah, sure .. just leave me freaking alone ..


The Hannover airport is not very big, but a lot of people probably arrived here this week because of the CeBIT, which I will attend to tomorrow as well. My brother already told me about some cool things from there.


I probably have photographed this model of the Hannover airport before, but I was too tired to remember. Looks cool though.


And this was my train (S-Bahn) getting me home. I could stay away by hearing very loud music, which probably annoyed some people in the train, but I did not care at that point :)


I took a little nap and headed to the office in the evening just to test out if the US-Version of Halo Wars works with my 3 year old Xbox 360. And yes, it does. Great! Good thing most games to not use that stupid region-code anymore these days.
Halo Wars itself is nicely produced, the cut-scenes and videos are top-notch. It is probably also fun to play for Halo fans and RTS newbies. But this game is in no way comparable to any PC RTS game. It is more like playing shooter or simple role playing game from above. The controls are pretty much the same as in Lord of the Rings and C&C Red Alert 2 on the Xbox 360, which is pretty much crap and highly simplified. The game is also way too easy, I just have played the first 3-4 missions, but you spend 90% of your time to press LB (selects all units you have) and then X to attack or move. The rest of the time you go back to your base with the horrible move control and build the very simplified base and some units, which is even annoying because you can only build when you have enough money, you cannot queue anything up for later. Last but not least the graphics are not very good, after watching those very high quality cut-scenes you will be thrown back to reality with the poorly lit scenes in-game and the horrible shadow-artifacts and very low polygon models (which does not make sense since the Xbox 360 is usually fill-rate limited, not so much vertex-limited). Also I would like to mention that I really hate the fact that every single Xbox 360 game says 1080p on the box and none of them support that mode, they all just render to 720p and scale everything up, which just looks horrible! Especially if you are used to Full-HD and much higher resolutions on the PC as I am every day.
It will probably sell well anyway as all Halo games have. But do not expect this game to be released on the PC ever. It would just not work and probably require much different controls and be way too boring and easy for PC gamers. Also Essemble Studios is no more and Microsoft will probably not want to port it to PC anyway.
But it is very cool that US Xbox 360 games work just fine in Europe. NTSC/Pal issues are non-existant anyway because for HD TVs these formats are not used (and would be supported anyway).


This trip was a lot of fun and I hope you enjoyed my pictures and comments. My webserver crashed several times in the last days and was not able to handle all requests (its running on a 1mbit dsl line, which pretty much sucks). I switched to another 1mbit dsl line, which seems to be more stable (but is still slow). I will have to switch to a real server next week, this is just too much for my little server at the office. Luckily I have access to some other servers. I just was too lazy in the past to setup my blog there (and clean it up a little), but now it makes sense since I'm blogging again, yay!

The last day of the MVP Summit (Wednesday) was actually quite short, just a couple of keynotes. But since the last few days have been so packed and exciting, it was nice to have some time to finally relax. I also needed that time to finally finish blogging these posts since I lagged several days behind.

Walking over to the Convention Center was the usual 1 minute walk. Initially I was a little confused because there was no brakefast at the hotel, but then I remembered today it will be at the Convention Center.


My breakfast for today. I was kinda late because I slept relatively long, but then again we stayed at the EMP Party to the very end last evening.


Tony Richards got everything started this day too.


The theme of this MVP Summit seemed to be Windows 7 and this stupid "I'm a PC" slogan. We even got some stickers for that. Nick had one of those stickers on his Mac, but that seemed strange too.


As you can see the crowd was very excited about something. Who can guess what is happening next?


Yes, you are correct, Steve Ballmer is coming up and bringing a lot of excitement with him, as usual. Even though Steve just reiterated whats going on at Microsoft, it was fun to watch him present and talk.


The Q&A had to be messed up with stupid questions and giving gifts to Ballmer as usual. But it got even worse in the next talk, which was supposed to be about Visual Studio 2010, but I did not even see a single screenshot of it. Probably have to check out the VS2010 PDC sessions sometime soon again (when the next beta/ctp of VS2010 comes out, hopefully that one is not on a virtual PC, which was just way too slow for me to do anything).


There was a short break between the first two keynotes and the last two keynotes.


Some guy had a T-Shirt explaining Geeks to us, which is helpful to know ^^


In the next keynote we saw a video about a little girl telling us how great VS is. Seems like that Video has been on YouTube for about a year and it does not seem to have been watched much.

After some other "This is coming up" slides Somasegar introduced us to the technical panel, which even included Anders Hejlsberg. But the Q&A just messed everything up again, most people were just asking why VB6 is not supported better or why Fox Pro is not supported. Same procedure as every year. The last talk about Windows Server 2008 RC2 and Hyper-V and other cool virtualization technologies was interesting again.


And thats it, the MVP Summit 2009 is over. In usual tradition all the XNA/DirectX MVPs got together at the last lunch and we even put together 2 tables again, same as last year.
Richard Thomson (on the right) has been a DirectX MVP for a long time and usually has a lot of stories to tell.


Nick Gravelyn and Vicente Cartas Espinel (Spanish XNA MVP) talking.


Even Andy is listening in, which is a very rare sight (him not talking that is).


Catalin Zima and Andy Dunn. After about 2 hours of talking, everyone split up and left the Conference Center. Some of us also went to some side sessions.


I took a couple more pictures in the streets.


And I went to the movies once again after blogging a bit. This time I saw Taken, which is a very action packed movie, that might not much sense in regard of one guy killing 20 people per minute, but the overall story was good and the pace was also quick so it never got any boring.


And finally some pictures of the Seattle Skyscrapers.


Tomorrow morning I will head to the airport and begin my long travel back to Germany. Not really excited about getting back, but at home it is always most comfortable. At Saturday I will also attend the CeBIT 2009 in Hannover, but I will probably make a short post of tomorrow as well. I hope you enjoyed my pictures and reporting so far.

Time to get up for Day 5 (Tuesday), the second day on the Microsoft Campus with deep technical sessions.


Looking at Mt. Helen from the bridge between Seattle and Redmond.


And finally getting over to the same buildings as yesterday after arriving at the Microsoft Convention Center. I will also come back here later this day for some extra sessions.


Back at the XNA Building I decided to take a look at some cool DirectX 11 sessions after the first XNA session, which was all about XNA Community games, which is still not available in Germany. So this talk not too exiciting for me yet, but stay tuned, hopefully later this year XNA Community Games will be introduced to Germany as well.


Since all the talks (especially everything about DirectX 11) was heavily under NDA, I can't talk about any of it, neither could I take any pictures. All I can say DirectX 11 is pretty amazing and I will definately check it out once hardware and Windows 7 is available (hopefully also later this year). So to keep the pictures going I took some boring photos like this from the ceiling of the XNA/DirectX sessions building.


Later a couple of guys helped out Kathleen getting some beers up to the last session and Q&A, which was a nice oppertunity to see under a Microsoft building. Might not be terribly exciting, but at least something to remember this day by.


After the last XNA session and some beer, some guys headed over to the company store. The only thing I wanted to buy here in the US is the Intel X25-M SATA SSD hard drive, which I could not found anywhere. Buying it online is also impossible since noone is willing to ship it to europe. So I have to buy it in Germany at 135% of the price here.
At around 5 pm we went back to the Convention Center and most guys went back to their hotels, but I stayed to check out a Paralell Programming session, which was quite interesting at first. The presenter was not very excited. But it was nice to see some cool tools of Visual Studio 2010, especially for debugging multithreaded applications. The stuff he was talking about involved a raytracing application with some spheres, which took even multithreaded 9 seconds for a 200x200 pixel image, so not very convincing to me (this kind of problems are easy to split up into multiple threads) and the other topics he scratched on did not sound very exciting either and since I hoped to see more VS2010 tomorrow at the keynote, I also headed back to the hotel at around 6 pm.


It was raining quite a lot and the EMP party (here are some videos from last year) has already started, but I headed out to finally buy some new batteries for my camera.


Since it was not allowed to take photos of the Science Museum at the EMP and I just wanted to drink and talk I did not take the newly operational camera with me. Instead you can see a boring picture of my hotel room until more pictures will be done tomorrow.

Day 4 (Monday) was actually just the second day of the MVP Summit and the first day all MVPs went to the Microsoft Campus. I was looking forward to see all the XNA MVPs from last years again.

The bus was packed as usual and I thought I was prepared very well, which turned out to be a wrong assumtion in a few minutes. Sorry, my main camera batteries are still dead, so not many pictures today, but at least I try to mention the people on the pictures and link to them.


As you can see the weather was not very good in the morning. Typical Seattle weather, but it got much better later this day.


At the MSCC (Microsoft Convention Center) at the Campus I pulled out my schedule for the day and tried to find out where do I have to go next. But there were no freaking building or room numbers on the schedule. Apparently if you have printed it out earlier than 3 days before the summit, there was no building/room information. Wtf? I tried to go online with the iPod Touch and it took me 5 minutes just to type in the stupid password and wait for timeouts. Then I tried to find out the schedule, but no, you have to logon to the MVP Summit site first, which again required a password I had not with me. I gave up and asked someone and was told Building 85 is probably the right one for me. I took the Tour 5 bus to get over there (the Microsoft Campus is quite huge).


At the building no one seemed to know what I was talking about when I asked where the XNA/DirectX session is. So I just pulled out my laptop and had to login again to the MVP Summit site just to find out the freaking room number. At least it just took a minute to get to that information from my laptop. I just should not use a freaking mobile device to find that kind of hidden information in the future. The meeting had already started, but I did not miss much because it was still a general talk about XNA and game development in general by the XNA game platform general manager Boyd Multerer. BTW on the right in the white T-Shirt you can see Catalin Zima, which I met last year for the first time. He seems to be on the XNA Community Forums quite a lot with the other crazy Forum MVPs like Andy "ZMan" Dunn and Nick "MrTwitter" Gravelyn.


The next talk was about upcoming XNA features and you can see all of that on the screen in the middle. You probably only get that joke as an MVP with an NDA that has to keep quiet about upcoming XNA stuff ^^


After some more talks and lunch we went to some test laps to test some games and play around (probably can't tell you more about this). On the right we see Nick smiling and probably twittering as usual. Apparently he was a little annoyed about some pictures I took of him last years, where he was in the middle of telling something ^^


At the Xbox 360 Building there have a lot of cool stuff staying around and many posters on the walls. Some guy had even some cool Left4Dead posters on his door, which I now want too since I'm a huge Left4Dead fan (on the PC however). No idea where to get such things. That Halo guy is not bad either.


Later that day we had some time to kill and went to the mall and checked out this book store for some XNA books, where some MVP was involved. Andy is grinning into the camera as usual and is continuing to tell us that we should not write books ^^


We also found a board and card game shop, where people could actually and play and try out games, cool stuff. But I have not played anything like that since I'm out of school. BTW on the right you can see Vicente Cartas Espinel, which is now my most favorite XNA MVP since he asked me to give him an autograph for one of his friends ^^


And yes, there was even a StarCraft board game. Also a lot of World of Warcraft, Star Wars, Settlers, etc. But since I do not know any people that would play such things with me, it is not really interesting. Probably fun stuff.


And finally we went to the XNA Party at some stylish bar, which included billard, rock band, pizzas, beer and cocktails. Very fun evening and it was very nice to learn more about the new MVPs and speak to them.


We also got some cool extra stuff from the Xbox/XNA team including the new Halo Wars Xbox 360 game, that will come out tomorrow. I'm a huge RTS fan, but I'm still not sure this will be as great as everyone says because both C&C and Lord of the Rings pretty much sucked on the Xbox 360 for me (I think it is even worse than controlling 3d shooters, which is pretty crappy too). Anyway, probably still a very good game and I'm very excited to try it out once I'm back in Germany. Hopefully it will even run on my German Xbox because it says NTSC on the box (we got Pal in Europe), but as far as I heard most games do not check for the region code anymore and PAL/NTSC does not matter anymore with HDTVs.

On day 3 it was time to move from my first hotel to the second one, which is payed by Microsoft ^^
The streets are empty as usual and the weather was not very good in the morning (raining).


The walk from the first hotel (8ths Ave In) to the next (Sheraton) was about 1km and not much of an issue.


After dropping off my luggage I headed over to the Convention Center next door and the raining had stopped.


At around 12 am I registered for the MVP Summit and got my badge and swag. Since the keynote does not start till 4 pm, I planed to go watch another movie. This time in the Regal 16 like last year right in front of the Convention Center.


Since I still had some time until the first movies start at around 1 pm, I watched some StarCraft VODs via the Wifi on my iPod. I have to say it is nice that Apple added YouTube support to the iPhone/iPod, but the interface is so incredibly bad, I much rather search for stuff myself via Google or the YouTube website.


Okay, time to see another movie. It was raining again. I saw Gran Torino with Clint Eastwood and this was most definitively the funniest movie Clint Eastwood has ever made.


After that I walked a little through the city and got something to eat.


And this is how police cars look in Seattle.


Ohh, its time to get back to the Convention Center, the keynote will start soon. This is the area where each region will later meet with all the other MVPs from each region.


Getting ready for the keynote.


Some details about the agenda. The next 2 days will be packed with deep sessions. Most keynotes will actually be on the last day, which will contain probably the most interesting announcements about Windows 7 and Visual Studio 2010. Also notice that there is no more Salmon this years, since this seemed to be the number one complain from last year.


Toby Richards introduces us to a couple of important people telling us more details. After that it was possible to ask some questions, but they kept it short so we did not get bored by this (most questions are not really that exciting for most other MVPs).


After the keynote was done, we just had to get outside the keynote room and we were right at the meeting area, were I met all the other MVPs from Germany.


Other MVPs from Germany and Switzerland, most I have met before, but also some new guys. Most guys were from Small or Essential Business Server or ASP.NET MVPs, but also some Sharepoint and Sql mixed in.


After a while Katrin, our MVP Lead from Germany, came by with Toby Richards, which shook all of our hands. I asked him if he wants to shake every MVPs hand and he said "of course, long night ahead of me" ^^


After some beers and eating some free food some of us German MVPs decided to go to the Space Needle via the Monorail train and take a look at Seattle at night.
At about this time my batteries of my camera died and most pictures from now on are from my crappy phone until I buy more batteries again.


Since the pictures of Seattle at night did not turn out too bad, here are some of them.


We had some nice discussions about Windows Mobile, iPhones, Apple and other technologies up there.


Seattle Downtown at night.


We probably spend more time discussing things than looking down, but the weather was not great with some rain and not very good visibility. But looking around was still fun, especially with the telescopes - like checking out what some people were watching on TV ^^


And finally at around 9 pm we took the very last train back to downtown. Some guys went to some bar and continued the fun, but I went back to the hotel and wrote some blogposts like this one.


More photos of tomorrow coming soon.

The weather on day 2 (Saturday) was a little bit less sunny, some clouds in the sky, but it did not rain until late in the evening.

From my hotel I could see all the construction going on in Seattle downtown.


It seems like the Seattle Space Needle got some satellite dishes upgrades overnight.


I walked around a little in the Seattle Center park, but most interesting stuff did not start until later, so I decided to head to downtown.


So, back in the Monorail for a quick trip to Seattle downtown. That guy on the right was looking at some tourist brochure for a long time and he hold it kinda strange. Like there was a naked girl in there after expanding the brochure.


Last time in Seattle I only took a quick peek at the Seattle Library. I decided to take a closer look this time, maybe read some books and check out the view from the top of the building (it is like 10 stories high). The building looks really cool from both the inside and the outside.


Even inside everything looks huge.


And the view from the top is also nice. But enough looking through the windows. Time to check out some books. I tried to search stuff via the website (free Wifi rules), but the system is kinda complex and it took me a while to figure out where the book is located that I searched for.


In the early afternoon I checked out another cinema I was not before. As you can see I was prepared for the movie ^^


The movie was called The International, and it was ok, a little long, but quite fun to watch with a lot of cool action scenes in the middle. The cinema was located halfway between both Monorail stations, so I went back to the hotel by foot.


Who would have imagined, they have American food here ^^


In the evening I went to another movie at the IMAX of the Pacific Science Center at the Seattle Center park, this time The Dark Knight. The movie did not make much sense, but I never liked any batman movie for that. However it was fun to watch and had a lot of cool effects and action scenes.


All that walking around and movie watching was quite exhausting and I was glad to go back to the hotel and relax for the rest of the day, reading emails and website updates. More tomorrow from the first day of the MVP Summit (keynote and stuff).

Hi Folks, this is finally the post for the first day. I was unable to get the pictures from my camera to my laptop because I forgot that cable. The SD card reader in my laptop also did not help me out as it does not detect anything. Luckily the Zen player could help me out since it allows to use a SD card as a removable USB disk (but it did not allow me to use the Import All feature, it did always crash my Zen, strange ..).

Okay, lets get started, this is on the morning of Friday where I started with a train ride to the airport.


A familiar sight at the Hannover airport. BTW this airport will be really crowded in a few days when the CeBIT 2009 starts (I will go there too after the MVP Summit next Saturday). I prepared myself mentally for a lot of waiting, but I never waited more than 30 minutes. I played mostly some iPhone games or listened to or watched stuff on my Zen player.


This is the first plane, called Cityhopper, which will get us to Amsterdam. The weather was rainy and cold. I checked online and the weather in Amsterdam and Seattle is pretty much the same.


Arriving in Amsterdam, not much going on here except rain. But it is a pretty big airport and it took almost half an hour just to get to the next gate.


After getting to the gate and answering all the stupid security questions like "Did you pack your luggage yourself?" or "Did you pack a big bomb or did someone give you a bomb?" it was already time to enter the next plane. Much bigger I have to say. I have to spend the next 10-11 hours in there, I did not expect much from the movie selection and was glad I had some own movies prepared for me. But I was surprised to be able to see some new movies and I saw the coolest movie this year so far with the guy from "Shawn of the Dead" Simon Pegg, called "How to Lose Friends & Alienate People". The movie itself does not make much sense and has a little too much senseless romance, but Simon is so incredibly funny, I laughed quite a lot.


I also made a few little videos like the following with my camera. The quality is pretty bad, but it will hopefully be fun to see in a few years. Just got off the plane and drove through a tunnel to Seattle in a bus. You can see some real life HDR, other than that not much in this video.


I finally arrived at the hotel after almost 20 hours of being awake. I noticed that I carry around quite a lot of hardware. From the left to right, Zen player, my good old MDA Windows Mobile phone, iPod Touch, Zune player, 16 GB Flash Memory and the camera I took this picture with. You can also see my Rubics cube in the picture, which I still have solve ^^


And this is the hotel room. The hotel is actually quite cheap for the Seattle Downtown area, but I liked it a lot. It got a freezer, microwave, free Wifi Internet connection and everything else was fine too. The only annoyance was the thin glasses in the window, which made me hear all the noise from the road at night. But that was not any better at the other hotels I stayed here.


After taking a nap for about 1.5 hours I went outside and looked around a bit. I saw this incredible long limo and a funny rotating sign with an elephant on it.


A supermarket in Seattle at night. I just got some things I forgot and was quite puzzled by the prices. A lot of take 2 for 1 deals and stuff a lot cheaper if you buy 700 of it. Not really useful for me. Also got some cookies and drinks not available in Germany ^^


And finally the Seattle Space Needle at night. More pictures tomorrow.

Yep, it is time for the MVP Summit again (starts this Sunday) and for that reason I will fly to Seattle once again in a few hours. Seems like I go there every year now ^^

This time I will have some extra time to run around and enjoy the cold weather (its not better here in Germany anyway). I will make photos as usual and have hopefully something interesting to say about whats going on.

Since I have a Zune, an iPod and a Creative Zen player and I will take all of them with me:

• Zune for playing around with XNA
• iPod for many apps and since I'm doing a bit of iPhones development right now
• And the Zen for actually hearing music and watching some movies. I just uploaded a crap-load of stuff onto that thing. Really cool that each movie or tv show is just a few 100 MB.

All 3 devices have pretty cool hardware. The Zune is not used much and kinda expensive, but at least interesting for its XNA capabilities.

The iPod is just way to expensive, but interesting for iPhone development. The iPhone is kinda cheap, but you will need a very expensive phone provider contract, which is over 1000 euros over 2 years here in Germany.

And then there is the Zen (or other devices), which do not have many extra features, but its cheap and it just works. It even got a SD slot so I can extend the flash memory. But the main reason why I use the Zen all the time is the amount of hours I can hear music or watch videos on (Zune or iPods with hard disks just suck in that regard, they will be empty in half a plane ride) and because I can put whatever I like on that thing. There is no stupid Zune player or iTunes to install. It does not tell me that I cannot use any files or that I have connected an iPod on too many PCs. Just drag and drop files over, which I often use for safes or copying files from home to work, or just drag in music, add some podcasts and for the plane ride I now also got some videos on there :)

BTW: Everything with the Zen mp3 player is great, even the software you can optionally install is non-intrusive for the most part. The only little annoyance is that it takes a long time to convert videos to .wmv files with 320x240 pixel resolution (required for playback) using the Creative Video Converter. But there are some other programs that can help:

• I tried AutoMKV, which always crashed for me when trying to do .wmvs, but other formats did work.
• There are tons of iPhone Video converter apps out there, most cost money and almost all of them are pretty crappy (both for performance and stability).
• And then there is the Free Zune Video Converter 1.1, which works pretty nice and is incredible fast.
• After that I stopped searching, there is probably more out there (even converters on the web, where you upload your movies, wtf?). Creative Video Converter is quick and dirty minus the quick, Free Zune Video Converter is fast and easy and VirtualDub is for the more complex jobs ^^

Ok, time to go to bed now, plane is lifting off in a few hours ..

This is the final post of my picture set (7 Days of posting pictures, uff). Nothing much happened on Friday. I just woke up in the hotel, posted the Thursday post, watched some more GOM TV StarCraft Videos and finally left to the Seattle Airport. My camera batteries were depleted and most of the pictures were not recorded because of that. From time to time I was able to shake the batteries enough to make one or two pictures ^^

I hope this is not the plane that will take me all the way back to Europe :)	After basically just walking over to the gate the plane was not there yet. I expected one or two hours of security checks and waiting like in the past, but it took maybe five or ten minutes to walk through that. Strange .. maybe it was early or just luck.	Ah, there is my plane. My laptop batteries are almost dead by now and I will read the book I brought along (Digital Fortress). Sleeping in the plane is not an option, way too uncomfortable and too noisy.
Bad weather in Frankfurt - Germany. We slided quite a bit on the water on the runway. By now it is actually Saturday because of the 10 hour flight plus the 9 hours time difference.	Cool secret underground tunnel. The airport was so packed, it took over an hour to get to the security and finally reach my gate just in time. And all that stress just to find out that my plane to Hamburg has not arrived yet and will be 30 minutes late.	Finally reaching Hamburg Airport (looks much smaller, doesn't it?). It is about 1:00 PM here now and I'm awake for 18 hours now.
Not only is Hamburg Airport much smaller, there are no train connections. You have to take a bus first and then drive all around the city. Next time I will probably take the Airport Express Bus, which drives directly to Hamburg Hauptbahnhof (main train station). It is quicker to get back home from there for me.

I hope you enjoyed my pictures. Sorry for any misspellings I might have made, just contact me to fix links or names. Most of the time I wrote the text in a bus ride or while listening to a session. Next I will probably blog a little bit about ASP.NET MVC, Silverlight and/or IronPython.

Thursday was the last day of the MVP Summit and the closing keynotes by Ray Ozzie and Steve Balmer were in the Seattle Convention Center again. Additional sessions were hold in the hotels later that day.

After eating some breakfast it was time for the final keynotes.	Ray Ozzie told us how great we are and told some not so exciting development and technology stories. Maybe it was still too early to listen to anything but jokes.	A short break and preparing the mind for the upcoming Steve Balmer speech.
The weather outside is as usual. I guess I was really lucky last Saturday, which was the nicest day wheaterwise I had all year.	Say hello to Steve Balmer.	Steve is moving so fast and always so excited about everything, it is hard to take a still picture of him.
Mr. Balmer is wondering about Microsoft's Strategy? Not really, he is just straching his head :)	Looks like he is giving up on the Online Business ^^ He was actually talking about the fact that Microsoft is only number 3 in Online Search. But as much as he wishes to change that I predict Google will be on the top for a long time to come.	Now that is a lot of products!
Time for some questions.	Poor Steve did not only have to answer 3 Sharepoint/Groove questions in a row, but then the Canadians went crazy once again and demanded that he will wear a stupid shirt like the rest of the Canadians.	Which Steve Balmer actually went along with ^^ Some questions were really stupid now, but Steve stayed cool and always had funny remarks.
More gifts for Balmer!	And this is what he looked like at the end. Well, it was a nice MVP Summit and most sessions and keynotes were exciting and fun to watch.	Time to get up and eat some lunch. But it is only 11:30, why eat lunch already .. crazy.
Still about 1700 MVPs around.	The Canadians couldn't stop making noise and drawing attention. Time for a final group photo. Other MVPs told me that this is not the first time they acted that strange and it was not funny anymore. Just stay normal guys, this is not a sporting event.	At lunch all the XNA/DirectX MVPs meet for a last time. We put 2 tables together and relaxed for a while until it was time to eat lunch.
Someone is taking a picture of us. I guess Andy Dunn will upload his pictures somewhere too, I will check out his blog later.	A lot of Asian guys were also taking pictures of themselfs :)	Saying bye to Pat and Andy Dunn and Andys Camera :)
Leaving the Conference area for the last time. Still only XNA/DirectX MVPs on this photo.	Nick Gravelyn is telling us about his next 100 game ideas.	And George Clingerman, Catalin Zima and me are listening.
And one optinoal session I attended to in the afternoon at the hotel. It was about the VS Debugger and VS 2008 SP1 and was very informative and exciting. Especially through the fact that the audience was quite loud about known bugs and issues we have every day.

Good. I made it, time for me to leave to the airport now. It will be a long trip back. It was a nice time here in Seattle, but I will be glad to be home again and not having to type on my laptop keyboard anymore :)

Wednesday Sessions were on the Microsoft Campus again. I was most of the time this day in Building 85 (same as yesterday) and listening and participating to XNA discussions. In the evening the fun MVP Attendee Party at the Experience Music Project at the Seattle Center, which was a lot of fun.

The day started again with taking the bus to the Microsoft Campus again. Since I woke up a little bit later today I ate half of my breakfast in the bus :)	The XNA Sessions are starting and everyone is checking emails and stuff. Took like 4 years to download 1 kb of data.	After the lunch break someone suggested that we go over to Building 84 and check out the "Wall of graphic cards", which was pretty cool, but we were not allowed to take photos for some strange reason.
This is Mateusz Kierepka from Poland, another XNA MVP, who thinks like me that Silverlight and XNA should merge sooner than later :) Sadly the XNA Team is not thinking the same way yet.	Leaving Building 85 after the final session ..	And heading back to the hotels.
Once there after preparing the post from the day before I headed out for the Party at the Seattle Center park.	And I was taking the Monorail once again, which is quite a bit faster than my feet.	The Seattle Space Needle at night (or at evening). Still people driving up and down ..
At the party we were again not allowed to take any pics of the Science Fiction Museum or the History of Music exhibition. And my camera batteries being low didn't help either.	Most other pictures of today were either blurry or boring. Sorry for not much more. Hopefully the Camera will be at good enough health tomorrow. I do not have anymore replacement batteries :(

And tomorrow some pictures of the final keynotes by Ray Ozzie and Steve Balmer and some final goodbye pictures.

Tuesday's Sessions were happening on the Microsoft Campus. Since the XNA MVP Party yesterday and waking up this morning (which is actually Wednesday) I had no time to prepare and publish this blog post. On the Microsoft Campus, especially in Building 85 (XNA Guys) there was no way I could upload this because Internet was just way too slow. So this post had to wait until I got back to the Hotel after the Attendee party.

This morning we could eat breakfast at the Hotel in this huge ballroom.	Walking out of the hotel to the bus, which will take us to the 15km distant Microsoft's Campus.	The weather is pretty much the same as on Monday or Sunday. Driving up north here until we reach the bridge over to Kirkland and Redmond.
After about a 40 minute drive we arrived at the Microsoft Conference Center (Building 33). Traffic is not going very fast over here ^^	This is how it looks inside the Microsoft Conference Center (short MSCC) at 9:00 in the morning when a conference is going on.	Instead of attending the first XNA session I decided to take a look at the Silverlight 2.0 talk by the master himself: Scott Guthrie
Until someone decided to throw down this wall, which causes quite a bit of noise and amusement.	And this was me uploading the post for Monday yesterday while listening to the sessions.	After eating some lunch and then some cake (see picture) I watched some StarCraft vods from GOM TV with the good old Nick 'Tasteless' commenting in English. This was the game with Tossgirl, which was very exciting to watch.
Shortly after that another session about ASP.NET MVC started with Scott Hanselman.	The MVC talk was very enjoyable to watch because of the many remarks Scott made.	As you can see, the MVC framework is still very much a work in progress.
Okay, let me take a look at that. Hmm, that should test the MVC routing engine. While Scott was talking about that I tried to write some MVC tests with Xunit, which worked just great (as advertised).	Setup-Code for some routes, looks complicated, but I'm not sure how to make them much easier.	I went to Building 85 now for more XNA sessions over there. It was raining quite a bit.
One of the buses traveling from building to building at the Microsoft Campus.	A few native DirectX MVPs, which probably make fun of us managed DirectX/XNA MVPs. But it is all in good fun, we all like DirectX somehow :)	Heading back to Seattle through all the traffic.
Instead of heading back to the Hotels all XNA/DirectX MVPs had a nice little dinner at Jillian's, which obviously did not have enough power to light up both parts of their logo.	Andy Dunn (The ZMan), Sean ?, Michael Klucher (from the XNA Team) and George Clingerman (Mr. www.XnaDevelopment.com) standing around and discussing the physics of billiard :)	Michael Klucher, Nick Gravelyn and Niko Sumi? sitting down and discussing more XNA.
And finally heading back to the Hotel after we were thrown out from Jillian's ^^

More pictures today from the second and last day at the Microsoft Campus. Cya!

Today (Monday, but it will be yesterday at the time I post this) was the first day of the MVP Summit 2008. BTW: I uploaded this post from the Microsoft Campus and it took around 2 hours to upload all the photos (2.5 MB ^^). Tomorrow I will do it from the Hotel again, no fun to do anything but a little surfing here.

After posting the blog post for Sunday (Day 2) from my hotel, the first thing I had to do was to move from my first Hotel (Renaissance) to the Seattle Conference Center and then later in the day to the Sheriton Hotel right beside it. The weather was similar to Sunday.	Several signs and banners were greeting the over 1700 MVPs and RDs that came to this event.	But before the opening welcome keynotes started it was time to eat some lunch first. The room was quite big and the food was good as usual :)
The keynotes were a little bit boring at first, but when Sean O'Driscoll came out and talked about MVPs and the evolution of Social Networking, it was very enjoyable because he is such a good speaker. You can see him on the picture above talking about Web 2.0.	After the welcome speaches the Open Space sessions started, which basically means you get together with a couple of other MVPs and everyone discusses around a given topic.	I attended the MVC and Unit Testing sessions and both were interessting, but the Testing discussion was more fruitful IMO.
This is one of the slides that were developed in the beginning of the Unit Testing session. I guess the discussion will continue somewhere on a blog or wiki somewhat soon.	The wheater outside was rainy again. I had to wait a bit until my hotel room was ready, so I walked around a bit trying to find any shopping stores that interested me. Let's just say I was not very interested at all the cloathing stores and restaurants here.	There is always construction of new sky scrappers going on here.
Still cold and raining ...	I ended up in "Little Italy" for a while, but again notthing of interest here for me.	This reminded me of a picture I took at my first trip to the US (Los Angeles in 2005).
Outside the Seattle Art Museum there was a big metal guy standing and waving his arm (or hamering something, I'm not that good at Art ^^).	Okay, and other wishes can also be satisfied here. Strange location for such a place, right next to the Seattle Art Museum.	The highway to the west and the Seattle Habour behind it.
Again the Public Libary of Seattle. This time it is open, but I'm back on my way to the hotel, my room should be ready now.	After finally checking in I had to go back to the Convention Center because the Welcome Dinner began right now and I had the chance once again to meet with the other MVPs from Germany, Switzerland and Austria.	Some other guys from Germany at the Welcome Dinner. As you can clearly see they are "Men" as it states right above their heads :)
The camera war has begun!	This is Peter Bucher in the middle, we talked quite a bit this evening. He is an ASP.NET MVP.	Some more German MVPs.
This guy had constantly problems with his camera, which was obviously better than all our other cameras combined :) He also took aprox. 10 times more pictures than everyone else at the MVP Summit combined ^^	And thats it for today. All other pictures were as blurry as my vision this evening after drinking all kinds of beer they had to offer here (I think it was Heiniken, Red Hook, MSC something, and something else, can't remember).

Tomorrow all the sessions will take place at the Microsoft Campus. Until then ..

Well, most of the pictures today are still from Saturday because I made so many that day. At Sunday the weather here was like in Germany, rainy and cold. I went a little shopping and went to a movie theatre, which was very enjoyable. In the evening I went to a MVP Germany meeting, but my Camera batteries died. But many other people made photos, I will post a link as soon as I know where all the photos are going to be uploaded.

The Space Needle I visited yesterday.	Well, it is not cheap to get up there. And due the good weather a lot of people had the same thought I had.	After waiting about 30 minutes in line I finally was driving up.
The buildings on the ground are getting smaller and smaller.	Great view at the top. You can walk on the inside and the outside and view in any direction you like.	The habour south of the Space Needle.
A big ship in the south west. It probably is too big to move any closer.	The waterfountain I posted yesterday from above. Its surreal how small the people are. It was a lot of fun zooming in at people and stuff going on down there.	A lot of buildings. Reminded me a bit of Ghost Recon. The jpg compression is also not working well on this image, it is more twice the size than the other images here ^^
Lake Union in the south east. My hotel was located there last time. The good weather also has its effects on the people down there :)	And to the east there is Lake Washington (hardly visible on this image) and behind that are Kirkland, Redmond, Bellevue and so on.	And finally Seattle Downtown south of the Space Needle. The MVP Summit will be on the very lower left side ^^
Mount Rainer, the highest mountain here, was also visible this day.	The water shader effects are certainly nice to look at. After spending about an hour on top of the Space Needle I decided to go back down to where all the action is.	And this is how Seattle looks at night at the daytime if you look at some monitors displaying night time in the middle of the day. Hopefully this sounded confusing enough.
A look up the Space Needle from below again.	A big red thingy.	In the Pacific Science Center you can watch movies in 3D, but all the movies were pretty boring (only kids stuff).
More stuff for kids in the Seattle Center Center Hall (what a stupid name). I ate some icecream and went back outside for the rest of the day exploring Seattle.	Even at bright daylight, if you take a picture directly of the sun, the surrounding area looks kinda dark. Confusing again ..	At sunday the weather was bad as I said above. I did not take many pictures. Here you can see my in the elevator playing around with my camera.
At the movies .. I saw Street Kings. It was an good movie with a lot of action and twists.	The public libary looks pretty cool. It is also quite big, but it was closed at Sunday.	And finally the Bank of America Towers, the biggest building here in Seattle. The weather was getting worse and it began to rain. I went back to my hotel and went to the MVP Germany meeting a few hours later (but no pictures because of my empty camera batteries).

And today (Monday) the MVP Summit will start. I'm pretty excited about this.

Since I had no internet access yesterday, this is the post from yesterday. It was great wheater here in Seattle when our plane arrived here and much hotter than in good old Germany. I took so many pictures that I will only post a few of them today and more tomorrow, but this post is still big, there are 26 pictures in here. I'm also trying to display them differently this time in a table, not sure if this is a good idea or not, but it should make the post shorter and give you a better overview about all days in case I keep up posting this much images (hehe, I love my new camera).

Starting from Hamburg - Germany at around 7 o'clock. Weather is cold as usual (have not experienced anything else because I just live there for 3 months now ^^).	After playing around with my Camera and getting more annoyed with my Zune after I installed the latest firmware yesterday (Zune software just sucks, same as any stupid iTunes stuff) at Hamburg airport and Frankfurt airport my plane to Seattle left at around 11:00 am from Frankfurt.	Germany is getting smaller and smaller and I tried to take a few shorts with maximum zoom but they all were to blurry, so I have chosen this picture instead. From now on the whole flight was above clouds and it seems like it was bad weather all over the place.
Over Greenland I some ground again, but it does look all icy and unpleasant down there ^^ The plane ride was actually quite nice, each seat had its own entertainment system, which crashed only twice during the flight (it was running Windows CE). Also my first time flying with Lufthansa to the US. As usual I could not sleep during the flight so I read a book and watched some movies and TV shows.	At around 11:30 AM we have been flying for over 9 hours but the local time tells us different. After flying over the Cascades (see picture) and later Mount Rainer we landed in Seattle. The immigration guy told me that it seems like half our plane was full of people attending the MVP Summit :)	And here we see Kirkland and Redmond where Microsoft is located. On the very left you can also see Seattle Downtown.
This is a better picture of Seattle. I zoomed in a bit because we were still kinda far away. The plane was originally approaching from the North, but after making a big curve we landed from the South. The airport seemed to be quite busy and that must be the reason for taking a bigger detour.	At the ground and after getting through all the extra security checks (well, here is your luggage, but hey, just give it back to us in a few minutes, we will check it again) I decided to take a bus to Seattle Downtown, which turned out to be the stupidest idea of the day.	Not only did the bus arrive 40 minutes behind schedule, it was also packed and the passengers were complaining how stupid the driver is. It seemed like he drove the wrong way and made stops where this bus is not supposed to stop. Next time I will take a cab again, I did not even find my hotel at first because no one seems to bother putting up street numbers anywhere on the houses. An impossibility in Germany.
But even without street numbers these buildings always amaze me. Frankfurt has some skyscrapers too, but in Hannover or Hamburg buildings do not seem to get very high and they certainly are not sitting right next to each other ^^	I finally reached my hotel and I got a nice view on the east side of Seattle, but the weather is just too nice to go to sleep now (just up for 19 hours, nothing special for a game programmer ^^).	Instead I decided to go down to steet level again and explore Seattle a little bit more. Last time I visited I skipped some attractions.
My hotel for the first two nights is this one, the Seattle Renaissance Hotel with 28 floors. I'm pretty much in the middle at floor 15. From Monday on I will stay at another Hotel sponsored by the MVP Summit :)	The sun is still high and the weather was really nice at around 18 degrees celisus, much better than in Germany and better than the last time I visited. It was nice to be able to run around with just a shirt on (ok, I had pants too).	Some flags outside a building. Can you spot the one that seems to appear twice?
On the left side you an see a church. Hmm, churches to certainly look much different in Germany.	Shadow mapping, reflection and lighting effects are working out quite nicely in this real-world-engine.	In the back you can see the Washington State Convention and Trade Center in Seattle where the MVP Summit will be held (for the most part I think).
Can you see the girl running through this waterfall?	This is ridiculous. If you want to wiretap someone, do not have a 10 meter high antenna sticking out of your car roof. No way no one did not notice this thingy.	Okay, where is the Monorail so I do not have to walk all the way over to the Seattle Center park. Ohh, I guess it is over there.
Last time I was here the ride was free, now it costs 2 dollars. Well, still better than walking and since a dollar is only 0.62 Euro cents, it is not that much ^^	For some reason I think these people are doing something wrong. It might be fun to walk down a roller coaster, but I guess there must be some other way to make it even more fun.	I took many pictures of the Space Needle and many pictures from the top, but I already posted enough pictures for today. I will post these pictures tomorrow. This is a big fountain in the middle of the Seattle Center park.
The sun decided to go to sleep, maybe I should think about it too after being up for almost 24 hours now (well, the day is not over yet).	If I had such a limousine getting back to the hotel would have been easier I guess. But instead of going back directly I went to shop a little bit. Gotta love the fact that most stores have opened up almost all the time and any day of the week.

More pictures tomorrow then (or actually later today I guess).

Tomorrow morning I will fly to Seattle - USA again and make many pictures with my new camera (no cell-phone pics anymore ^^). The MVP Summit starts Monday, but it was cheaper to fly Saturday and I will have 2 days visiting Seattle again. Hopefully I will have Internet Access every day so I can upload pictures I took over there.

I have to go to sleep now, my journey starts in a few hours and sleeping in the plane never worked out great for me :)

Sorry about all the delay, I wrote 4 blog posts already in this week, but did not finish them up (was always too tired to post them). I will post them in the next few days. Instead this blog post is just about today.

The day started with the Community GetTogether Event from Microsoft on the CeBIT, where all the MVPs, CLIP, RDs, Student Partners, Codezone-Experts and Microsoft Evengelists from Germany met. Last year I could not attend the CeBIT or the Community GetTogether in Germany because I was on the GDC 2007 in San Francisco and wrote the GDC Dungeon Quest game there ^^

The first session was about Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1. Download it here if you want to try it out, it got some nice features for developers and other things like Activities and Webslices, which sound nice, but you will have to wait until more websites actually support them. The browser does not convince me yet. Maybe the presentation was not that great, many webpages did not look ok and the browser crashed several times, it also looks pretty much the same as IE7. I'm still using Firefox 2 (and 3 for playing around a bit) a lot more than any other browser, especially thanks to great addons like FireBug.

Anyway, after another session about Students in Germany and their lack of .NET knowledge and other things like how many do wash their clothes themselfs, the nice girl in front of me from Microsoft reminded me to take some photos myself :) Got ya, haha.


In between the sessions I met with my good friend Luo Yu (see photo, he is an amazing graphic artist and works with me on a couple of projects) and an ex-intern of mine Stefan Kraus from BiteTheBytes.com (see website link for more information, no photo here ^^). Stefan is involved in some interesting projects, some smaller games and especially his Cloddy Technology, which was created by him and 2 other friends to render huge 3D landscape areas with high performance in a unlimited amount of detail (well, after asking what that means it turns out it is limited by doubles ^^).


I sat through another session of the GetTogether Event, this time by my good old compadre Dirk Primbs about Visual Studio 2008. He has a lot of webcasts links on his blog, check it out if you want to see some german sessions :) Otherwise you should definately check out the Mix08 Session Videos from Las Vegas, I find the Video with the fake Elvis asking people about Silverlight 2.0 the funniest.

After some networking and meeting Microsoft people I joined with the other guys and walked through some CeBIT halls. Nothing special about the halls or people, it was very packed as always on Saturdays.


And as you can see here, if you look into this absolutely normal looking device and put these absolutely non-freaky glasses on, you can see some non-ugly animated figure telling waving at you in 3D. But beware, after a minute you might get some headaches and you have of course keep your head still and only look from a certain angle and distance. Man, when do they ever stop producing this bullshit? It is always the same kind of device in the last 10 years and no one buys it or really wants it.


Ok, here we see one of the exhibitors of the Games Convention 2008 throwing some stuff into the crowd .. wait a second, we are not on the Games Convention yet, this is still the CeBIT, but ok, it is Saturday and the people do not care where the presents are coming from. Fun to watch as always, and we have to ignore the fact that 10 years ago I was one of those guys too wanting to get a free ball pen I would never use.


These guys are building a freaking looking robot and have certainly not seen the new Terminator series yet. They are actually from the TU Chemnitz (a university) and it was a tournament where the robots had to play a game with tennis balls to catch some rings and score some points. Not as brutal as the Robot Wars (tv series), but certainly amazing work from students and a lot of participants. Nice athmosphere building and testing these robots by the way, there were many tables like this.


And here we see one of the teams testing their robot. And you can see me not having any useful camera, the robot was not even moving fast ^^ I should buy some better equipment for the next event I go to (next one will probably be the MVP Summit in a month).


Ok, we are back to the throwing useless stuff into crowd part!


And this is the huge booth of the T-Com/Telekom (together with IBM and SAP one of the biggest and best looking booths) where a lot of sessions were hold in the so called "Trendforum". You can watch all the videos from the CeBIT Trendforum here, some of the sessions are in english and the speakers are very good and have some interesting topics. I did not watch any of them there, but once my brother told me about it and gave me the link I watched some videos and were very pleased with them, especially the one from Nicholas Carr (author of book The Big Switch) about the changes in moving from local servers to a "world computer".


Big cars and small womans (that is what Luo told me as I took this picture) should also be on all fairs. Do we remember where this was? No, not really!


The Samsung booth was also very big, but I could not spot any new exciting big monitors. But there were a lot of small devices, headsets, mp3 players and other stuff that does not really interest me that much these days. I'm currently in the "I got all I need"-mode :)


And here you can see the plan of one of my new cities, just that is not by me and in fact some big company in Asia planing a new city part this way. Looks nice (is about 50cm x 50cm small).


This was really strange. We went on the Microsoft booth and just behind all the Xboxes and games there was a bakery. You could actually get some biscuits and bread after filling out a form about some IT questions.


And while we are on the Microsoft booth we thought about the question if Bill Gates might need some extra money to become the richest man on the world again after losing his first place the first time after 13 years this week. Maybe all Microsoft employees should start collecting some money for Bill :) This nice lady was trying to convince people to get active in the Microsoft Student Partner program, but I guess I'm already too old (oh my).


And here you can see me sitting down for a minute and happy that we can go home soon (hey, I'm a programmer sitting around all day, I'm not used to walking that much) :)


But we are not done yet, let take a look at this IBM server with 64 hard disks up to 500 GB, in total something like 30 TB storage space. You can even stack up (well, not on top of each other, just side by side in a big room) 6 of those beasts if that is not enough for you. But as we have learned from the webcast from Nicholas Carr above we won't need that much power in the future, just use the servers that are already in the internet. Other than that these things are not really cheap, I prefer building my own server setup.


In hall 18 there was a really loud band singing "Sex Bomb" and they actually did a good job. After spending some minutes there our ears almost explode and we went outside to cool off. Poor guys spending all those days in that booth (Trekstor actually, hey I remembered something).


And finally the ride back in a train full of people. We even took an early train, I do not want to know how full the later trains have been. Ok, time to finish up my other blog posts. I hope you enjoyed these pictures.