The second deep session day was also very informative, but still very much top secret stuff. All this stuff will be announced on the GDC and MIX in a few weeks anyway, but I guess for a big company timing is everything for press releases.


It was very sunny today, I did not even take a jacket with me. The weather was still kinda cold, but since I will be indoor all day I do not really need a jacket.


While waiting for the bus a few other MVPs came along and asked me if I want to ride with them in their car to the summit. I said yes and we talked a bit about this summit and that it is way better this year that Microsoft actually tells us about new exciting stuff and not already publiced information as last year.


I arrived early and had some time to read emails and surf a little.


I also checked a few new websites and blogs other guys were talking about, like http://lostgarden.com/.


More XNA team members joined us today. These two are from education and website and product management.


In the lunch break we went to the company store. The Socksup guy also had to explain his nickname to everyone and it took longer the more drunk he was ^^


Shuttle cars and busses were taking MVPs back and forth from the hotels and Microsoft campus.


After walking around in circles for a while we finally got the the Company store, which was only a few hundered meters away from where we started ^^ Lots of products here, not much interesting stuff however.


There were a couple of older Xbox 360 games and I bought Ninja Gaiden for a few dollars, which is good as far as others told me. I also got some cheap t-shirts with some Windows logos on them.


The other guys also got some stuff and we quickly went back to our meeting room for more XNA talk.


In the meantime I was downloading StarCraft II beta (the beta started today finally), which took a long time. I could not do much else because the guest wifi was blocking all useful ports for VPN, VNC, IRC, etc. which was a little annoying because some programs I use depend on VPN working for example.


My netbook CPU should be way too slow for StarCraft II, but I installed it anyway. Still do not have a beta-key however, but I registered for the opt-in beta (which is probably bullshit anyway if millions of people trying to opt-in and they only give away a few more keys).


Okay, the long day is over (some of us were a little tired from too much partying yesterday) and we had some time to get back to the hotels, relax a little and then go to the big party this evening at the Garage in Seattle.


Nick (former MVP, now Microsoft employee) and some other XNA team guys are still talking to George Clingermann (XNA MVP).


On the bus ride back Dong-Hoon Kim (XNA MVP from Korea) and me took a few quick pictures from ourselfs. I learned some stuff about Korea and we talked about XNA and cultural differences quite a bit.


A little later we drove over to the Garage party location:



At the party, which was huge, you could play billard and


Bowling of course.


Lots of crazy drinks at the bar.


The XNA MVPs bunched up around Andy, who had lots of stories for us about his former Microsoft days and having meetings with Bill Gates in it and stuff like that.

A little while later you see some other MVPs talking and discussing stuff:



Other people also took quite a lot of pictures, which much better cameras however.


At 23:30 they tried get rid of us with telling us the last busses are leaving now.


The busses back to the hotel.


And finally reaching the hotel at 00:00, time to go to bed early today (relatively to the last few days where it was always between 01:00 and 02:00 am.