From Seattle with love

Once again this year Urban Turtle took part to the Visual Studio Partners Program summit at Microsoft campus in Redmond (just near Seattle) and, once again, it was such an amazing week for us!

After a long trip from Montreal, we enjoyed our first day in Redmond by having a walk on Microsoft campus. We were quite impressed by the nature and all installations over there. Even after 3 visits of the campus in 3 years, I’m still amaze by that beautiful campus.

First day: an evening in Bellevue!

The 2016 summit really started with the partner expo in Bellevue. A good opportunity to connect with other partners such as our friends Infragistics and Stackify, see what they’ve been doing and discuss with the Microsoft sales and marketing crew. It was a very nice evening where we had the chance to play pool and to present our new upcoming feature: the Stand Up view. The reactions were very good!

Day 2 and 3: have you said multi-platforms?

The second and third day of the summit were dedicated to Microsoft presentations about last year realisations and upcoming roadmap. Let say that if someone didn’t know that Microsoft was working really hard on supporting other platform with .NET and support other development languages on Visual Studio Code, well now they know! Most of the conferences were about how Microsoft supports every kind of development and every kind of developers. So if you want to develop Java mobile apps, well Microsoft has a solution for you. They even have a Visual Studio solution for C++ Linux development (yeah that’s a… very specific topic!).

The other main topic, well for us actually, was the new Marketplace for Visual Studio Team Services. Actually Microsoft released a new version of their marketplace earlier this year and is about the release a new version of it. The new marketplace gives third parties the opportunity to market their extensions. So VSTS users can upgrade their account with several useful add-ons. A good way to promote new tools to help you guys with your everyday Agile development.

So that’s pretty much it for this year summit! Kudos to Microsoft for their hospitality and great summit.