Platforma 2011

Yesterday I was at conference “The Platform 2011”. It’s the biggest event that organized by Microsoft in Russia. Another name of this conference is “Russian TechEd” because “TechEd” is a name for the biggest Microsoft events in the world. Russian event is bigger than most of them excerpt TechEd USA and probably TechEd Europe. In this year’s conference include 1,500 participants and more than 80 presentations.

The conference begun and ended dance presentation. This year’s dance presentation is short, but it is beautiful and interesting. It showed interactive elements. The dancers were dressed in black like ninja and they had glow rods. They danced at the dark hall. During that time the light figures translated to the screen with slow motion camera. So we can see some sort of light drawing.

At the conference we don’t have much news, but we have interesting details about innovative products. Microsoft event PDC finished just 2 weeks ago in the USA. On PDC event Microsoft presents new technology. In Platform event, local office of Microsoft Corporation discussed about new technologies on Russian.

Latest news are Russian users can have Xbox Live account officially. Before, Russian users should use foreign accounts or don’t use Xbox Live at all.  And of course Microsoft starts selling of Kinnect device in Russia.  Kinnect is an innovation game controller for Xbox Live games, a controller-free gaming and entertainment experience. You can play there with your whole body. It’s like a real life game. While playing, you can jump, you can move whatever you like, use your arms and sometimes you can fall. It’s a fun experience and best of all good for our health compare to just sitting on a chair with ordinary game pad.

The most of presentation were about different Microsoft projects and Technologies like Windows Server, SQL Server, SharePoint, Cloud Computing etc. We had few guest stars at conference. For example Eric Rudder the senior vice-president of Microsoft makes a keynote presentation and David Chappell an independent guru. Actually Rudder is a boring corporate guy but I like Chappell presentations. He participated in Platforma event a few years and it was always interesting. And this guy has excellent and understandable English.