Vista by Night in Bucharest

Our RD Program Manager Kevin challenged the Regional Directors from all over the world to participate in a very interesting contest. We were basically required to create a photo including a minimum of three items: one piece of RD in standard gear :), a laptop running Vista and some Office 2007 apps, and a landmark of the region we are coming from. The photo was supposed to be accompanied by a quote regarding the developer experience on Vista and Office 2007.

TechEd Developers 2006 brought two huge surprises to me. The first one came in the preconference day when we were participating in our RD side meeting and it turned out that I won one of the big prizes for the best quote! This prize contains among other things an XBOX 360.

  Here you can see the picture I created for this cool contest. The quote, well... it sounds like this:

Why will Windows Vista change my life as a developer? Because for the first time in my professional career I will be able to deliver applications having the kind of super cool user interface I was dreaming about since my first contact with extraordinary stories like Star Wars and Dune. Combined with Office 2007, it will also change my life as a developer because it is the first time that I feel I am in total control while planning and implementing software solutions on Windows. It just feels great to be a developer these days!

But the second surprise was even bigger than the first. During his keynote at TechEd Developers, Eric Rudder, Senior Vice President at Microsoft, used some of our photos in one of his slides to show the coverage of the RD program worldwide. He also took a moment to thank all RDs for their extraordinary efforts. If I remember well, this actually was the very first time when one of Microsoft's senior officials thanks the RDs during a TechEd keynote! I really felt very proud that I am part of this extraordinary bunch of people who are commonly refered as Microsoft Regional Directors.