The Right Stuff

Last week Marci, Bergo and me were invited to join the Beachcoding Party organized by Microsoft. Germany's finalists of this year's Imagine Cup were there to receive their awards.

The location itself was very impressing: The hall where Cargolifter AG planned to build a large airship for transportation of heavy loads has been redesigned into Tropical Islands Resort after Cargolifter announced insolvency in 2002. The hall is today a vacation resort in the middle of cold Germany: Full of tropical plants, sea sand, two swimming sites, heated to 25 degree and opened 24 hours, 365 days a year. The unpleasant weather outside didn't bother us in any way.

After we received our conference badges and put our luggage into the tent, the shuttle service moved us into a smaller conference hangar (Tropical Islands is located on an abandoned airfield) where Academic Program Manager Entertainer Dr. Ingo Dahm introduced us to the whole event. After that, Frank Fischer, head of Microsoft's Evangelism team (wondering where Uwe Baumann moved to), showed us the parallel of Outlook's spam filter and Aids research. After a short coffee break Dirk Primbs hold a very good presentation on Five Mortal Sins of Security. Dirk's talk has been a nice recap of security awareness I've obtained reading Writing Secure Code and watching various webcasts on the topic.

The evening started with a conference dinner and show on the "South Seas". Afterwards the prices were given to the top three projects in every category. Unfortunately only Germany's winning team got the opportunity to talk a little about their project. Dr. Said Zahedani, flown in from Paris, answered a couple of questions from the attendees regarding Microsoft products and strategies. Later, the beachcoding begun: Dirk Primbs and Oliver Scheer implemented Hangman on a Vista Machine, of course dropping hints of new features here and there. The party went on with busloads (credits to Kris :)) of free beer until 2 in the morning.

It's been a nice event!