Friday, May 2, 2008

Microsoft does .NET Event in SecondLife

By JayR Cela 5/2/08


This Week, I was invited to a virtual world event hosted by Micro Soft, courtesy of Linden Labs Second Life(tm) internet Virtual World platform. The former had set up several islands to host a number of .NET developers an enthusiast's. I'll admit I was quite impressed upon initial arrival. MS had numerous in world employee's there to greet and direct all newcomers and old time SLifers as well, they were very friendly and helpful to everyone. This this is a bit unusual, most SL in world experiences with corporate entity's, (an exception being Sun Micro Systems) that I have experienced, are not as well planned or executed. However, as with any new medium of virtual communications first time large scale event, things swiftly started to unravel.

MS had set up 3 separate islands for the attendee's, depending upon their particular interests. My teleport to the Visual Studio island landed me somewhere in a lake bed underwater, but according to my map, I was close enough to make my way to the proper location. Within a minute I was at the auditorium that had been set up with help from LL. I sat and watched as the MS employee's unfamiliar with this new virtual environment, struggled with in world Power Point slides, and the spotty voice chat performance that seems to be so common in SL. Most problems were eventually resolved, and the presentation proceeded, minus the PP slide show.

In closing, I would like to say, that considering recent difficulties LL has been experiencing the past month or so, things seemed to go over well enough to satisfy, the majority of attendee's. I base this statement on follow up, in world text chat, and the dot~NET group IM comments afterwards.

Does this mean that the Linden Lab folks are finally getting a handle on things? I sincerely hope so.

JayR Cela :_)

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