During the weekend that just passed, I was invited to the Academic Bootcamp organized each year by Microsoft Romania. This year, the location was the Parâng area with accommodation at Hotel Rusu, near the town of Petroşani.

I participated in some panel discussions related to Vista, Office, and .NET Framework 3.0. I also talked for more than one hour about Data Mining (here is the presentation, unfortunately only in Romanian).

Besides being a great opportunity to meet with the Romanian MVP's and to speak in front of some of the most promising young talents in Romania, the weekend at Rusu was an excellent excuse to go wild with some rafting on the Jiu river as wells as a tone of other different sports (football, tennis, climbing, and so on). Some of the photos taken during the weekend by our good friend Aurelian and his wife are available here.

All in all, it was an excellent weekend, spiced with the right mix of technology and fun.

As I was playing around with the new Beta 2 TR, among the first things I noticed was that Save as PDF is missing. As you probably know, there is a war going on with Adobe on this matter. Fortunatelly, the function is available as a separate download here.

Microsoft released a Technical Refresh for Office 2007 Beta 2. This is probably the last major release before the RTM scheduled for the end of this year. The TR for Office System is available here, the TR for SharePoint Server is available here, and the TR for SharePoint Designer is available here.

And yes, the bits are compatible with Windows Vista RC1.

The Ministry of Communications and Information Technology is lanching today a four-year branding strategy for Romania's IT industry. You can read here the official announcement and here the strategy document (both of them are in romanian).

The initiative by itself is a very good one especially if we remember that Romania has been missing for the past 16 years such a strategy. The quality of romanian IT specialists is wellknown worldwide, but the country itself was somehow not able to benefit from this strong brand. In the past 5-6 years we witnessed several romanian IT companies emerging as strong representatives of the industry. Unfortunatelly, their efforts were (and still are) individual, hence the results are rather far from the ones that could have been achieved based on an industry-level strategy.

I hope this is more than "light & magic" and there is a real driving force behind the initiative (rather hard to believe when you see the date of the last article posted on www.itviewpoint.ro - the official website of the initiative).

I just read a very interesting Q&A  with Ramon Casadesus-Masanell and Pankaj Ghemawat related to a research the two of them conducted on the battle between Microsoft and OSS. The Q&A is published on the Harvard Business School's Working Knowledge for Business Leaders web site.

I personally think the approach of the study conducted by the two of them is perhaps one of the best I've encountered so far. Of course, the work has been performed in the pre-Vista, pre-Office 2007 and pre-.NET Framework 3.0 age, so one can argue the situation has changed today.

However, the conclusion of their work is one that I totally agree with: if both Microsoft's Windows and Linux do their homework right, they will remain in the market for a long time.

One thing's sure: Microsoft did get the homework right with Windows Vista.