Grapecity Powertools Russ Cam™ - Episode 46 - Mvp summit

Hi. I'm Martin and you're watching Russ Cam! Here we go! My name is Martin Hinshelwood. I'm a ALM MVP. I'm originally from Scotland but I work here in Kirkland. I work as a consultant for a company called Northwest Cadence. We go all over the US doing ALM engagements. GrapeCity has an office right here in Kirkland as a matter of fact. Ah! How about that! I'm really looking forward to finding out what's in the next, next version of Visual Studio rather than the one that's not quite out yet. I believe they're releasing the beta on Wednesday? Now is there a code name for that? Visual Studio 11 is - yep. Microsoft has kind of given up on code names because they tend to stick. I think the only one that ever stuck that went into an actual product was XBOX. That was it. That was the code name. Yeah. Absolutely. Well I saw you taking a look at our cookbook over there. Yes! Well, it's awesome! I was thinking there's a few recipes my wife would quite enjoy in there. Oh yeah? And how about you? Do you do any cooking? I do a little bit of cooking. I don't tend to be allowed to cook that often. I'm told I make a mess and take a long time to cook things. But that's only because I do it properly. That's right. My name is Christopher Bennage and I currently work for Microsoft Patterns and Practices. My focus lately has been actually in the space of HTML5 and javascript. So how do you like working for Microsoft, man? It is like going back to college actually. [LAUGHTER] Yeah! I love it! You know what blew me away - and this was even twelve years ago when I was at Microsoft in the beginning - was the internal infrastructure. I could not believe all of the internal websites, right, that are inside the company. It is just amazing! And the Patterns and Practices, man, congratulations. You landed in a great group. That stuff is hot. So you are a former Russ' Toolshed presenter, right? An alumni. Exactly. So you were telling me you're really looking forward to just hanging out this week, huh? Absolutely, yeah. So I was an MVP for about I think 3 years prior to - I had to give up my MVP to become an employee. And so I have a great sentimental attachment to the summit. I just love being here and seeing everyone actually. So you've been at the MVP Summit how many times now? Let's see. I was an MVP back in 2007. Wow. That's five years. Yeah. And I started working for Microsoft in 2011. Oh wow. That's probably, what, 6 or 7 times I guess. It's a great conference, aint it? I lost count. What do you think of the conference? It's the best place to come to. It's the best place to meet people. Yeah. Interact. Meet good friends. Great place to collaborate I guess. Well that's cool. I'm Mike Benkovich. I run Benko Tips, which is kind of the only thing you need to know. Go to Benkotips.com. Read all about it. Right? That's it! Benko Tips! Man, it's good! You've got to love it. It's all about branding, right? Developer resources. You know, when I worked on that same team as you at Microsoft as an MSDN presenter and developer evangelist, a lot of times in my demos I would put like “Russ’ Tooshed” under whatever. Oh yeah? And you were the only other guy I knew that did like the branding. You always put like “Benko” in your demo apps. Benkotips. That’s it. Benkotips.com, baby. And if you’ve ever been out there lately, I’ve been building it out so I have all of the user groups. I’ve got office hours running on there. I’ve got webcasts. I’ve got lots of good stuff. I'm Steve St. Jean. I'm a Visual Studio ALM MVP. Yeah. I'm also a Senior ALM Consultant with Imaginet. And you're from New England! I'm from New England! Old Shed Head! Old Shed Head! Yes! [LAUGHTER] That's a blast from the past! That's great! So you've been involved in some of the code camps up there, too, huh? Yeah. I try to get up there for the twice a year code camps. They’ve been going on forever and a day. Yeah. The original code camps that you’re familiar with. You’re right! That is the first one, right! The home of the code camp. Yeah, that’s it. And so we try to get up there and do at least one or two presentations every time we’re there. We’ve got some really good stuff going on with the dev team coming up tomorrow and on Wednesday. Oh yeah? Yeah. They’re looking at a lot of really good stuff. Some of it, of course, we can’t really talk about it. VS11? VS11. Hopefully VS12 as well. Wow! Wow! Wow! Wow! This episode of Russ Cam is brought to you by ActiveAnalysis from GrapeCity PowerTools. ActiveAnalysis. It's a custom control that is a totally self-contained business intelligence application. A developer can just go [WHISTLE] in the application, connect it to our data, give it to a business guy and they can slice and dice, and look and graph, and OLAP their way to happiness. ActiveAnalysis from GrapeCity PowerTools. Smarter components for smarter developers. [PAUSE] Go to GVTV.GCPowerTools.com. Your online source for developer news. Plus follow us on Twitter and Facebook.