Yesterday marked the passing of the second of our quarterly Microsoft Student Partner meetings. Held at the home of MSN and Xbox in central London we had a great turnout with over 40 of our 60 MSPs making the trip from as far afield as Belfast, Edinburgh and Glasgow.

Despite subjecting them to the vagaries of the British weather on a two hour open top bus tour on Sunday afternoon taking in the sights of London (Buckingham Palace, Trafalgar Square, the Tower of London, Big Ben, Westminster Abbey, Fleet Street, Tower Bridge, the Tate Modern and the new, fabulous sky-scraper nicknamed the erotic gherkin but aka the new headquarters for Swiss Re, designed by Sir Norman Foster, architect of the infamous Millennium swaying bridge and the new Wembley football stadium, ) AND despite an evening out and about in Soho, I’m happy to report that all the MSPs made it safely to yesterday’s meeting.  

Having just read through the evaluation forms it looks like the day was a huge hit with all. The presenters really managed to hit the mark especially Jason Langridge and Paul Randle with their respective presentations on Mobile Development and Media Center and of course their various displays of gadgetry including one of only seven portable Media Centers actually in existence in the world; the latest Toshiba Satellite P25-S609 Media Center as well as a whole bunch of the latest smartphones and PDAs. The afternoon then progressed with a number Xbox presentations including the announcement of the new Xbox LAN party kit that we’re making available to all MSPs as well as gaming development employment opportunities with Rare Software. The day then culminated with some amazing examples of activities that the MSPs have been doing during the past three months including the recent PC LAN Party held at Wolverhampton University and two great applications developed for the Tablet PC by Tom et al from Birmingham University (Interactive Logbook) and John from the University of Hull.

So now I need to get my thinking cap on as to how we can better the second event and think of some even sexier gadgets and giveaways for the third event at Microsoft Research in Cambridge in June… Any ideas?!