About two weeks ago I had the pleasure of being a participant in the MS SUMMIT 2014 which took place in Bucharest, Romania. Although I can fully say I never liked focusing on big companies, be them described as the good or the bad guy, Microsoft actually impressed me for a chance.

Unfortunately due to the schedule I didn't have time to view all open conferences, but I could follow some of them, in my opinion, highlights of the summit.

Microsoft summit highlights:

I would like to congratulate the following presentations as some of the best I ever saw:

Stefan Cronjaeger – Technical Solution Specialist for Parallel Data Warehouse, Microsoft Corporation – whom provided one of the best presentations on PDW I ever saw, actually making me understand the effort put in development of both the setup conceptually and of the appliance itself. Too bad it's extremely expensive or I would have, otherwise, invest in one for my apps.

Eron Kelly – General Manager SQL Server Marketing, Microsoft Corporation – has presented in great detail the importance of insights and data analysis, putting data science up as the next field to be.

David Chappell – Principal, Chappell & Associates – has finally managed to make me understand why sometimes NOSQL is better, but has also given an upvote to my personal belief that SQL will never die and we should accept NOSQL as part of SQL+

Daniel Popescu – Partner Technology Advisor, Microsoft Romania – made me understand that some elements of my business setup (Active Directory, WSUS etc.) could very well go into the cloud. Nice work on Azure.

Andy Malone – Microsoft MVP, MCT (UK) , Microsoft Corporation – taught me about the dangers of the deep web, and now I will never go there, for "sure" ;). Great presentation on the TOR network.

Kraig Brockschmidt – Senior Content Developer, Microsoft Corporation –
whom showed me that … I like WinJS.

I will come back to you and present more on each technology. There is something happening in MICROSOFT, and it's good. Look only at what open-source quality they are putting in the market now.