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.

The story we all witnessed with SQL Server Reporting Services a couple of years ago is going to be repeated. This time, Microsoft decided to release version 1.0 of Atlas before the next release of Visual Studio codename Orcas. It is yet another great example of how the voices of community and industry are able to influence decisions in Redmond.

The plan is to deliver this year a fully supported set of core features  packed as follows:

• Microsoft AJAX Library - the client-side ATLAS JavaScript library
• ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX Extensions - the server-side ATLAS functionality
• ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit - a set of free, shared source controls and components

For more details, just take a look to this post from Scott Guthrie's blog.

Windows live has just been released. Take a look at http://www.live.com.

The latest Orcas CTP is available for download here. Now we have everything in place to build great Vista apps: Vista RC1, Vista RC1 SDK, and Orcas for Vista RC1.

So, let the show begin :) I can't wait for the autumn roadshow to start here in Romania! 

It looks like it's final now, I will deliver the first Windows Vista & Office 2007 course in the first week of October together with ProManagement in Bucharest. Keep an eye on their website for the official announcement. From what we know so far, the seats are in great demand, so there is a good chance we will repeat the course at least once in the close future. 

So this is the 'official' launch of my personal website. I just finished the last tweaks, integrated both Virtual Earth (into the Contact section) and Windows Live Writer (into the Blog) and now everything is ready to go online. I'm planning to post here lots of technology-related stuff as well as some personal thoughts (most probably still technology-related since I'm a certified geek as my good friend Zoli classifies me :) ). Keep an eye on the Regional Director section of the site where all my demos, talks, and presentations will be available (I'll try to make available older ones too, but I can't promise anything).

By the way, you should look into Zoli's blog and let us know your opinion about the autumn roadshow. I thought last year's autumn was a busy one, but it looks like this year it will be even wilder. Lots of new stuff (some of which is really groundbreaking) like WPF, WCF, WF, WCS, Vista, Office, SharePoint, the Live stuff, and the list goes on and on. Speaking about the Live stuff, there was not much publicity in Romania around it, but believe me, it's awesome. I really enjoyed the time spent integrating VE and WLW into this site (for WLW I implemented the MetaWeblog API over XML-RPC).

That's it for now, I'll get back to preparing my Tech-Ed Developers presentations since the deadline is closing fast.