And we’d reached the last day of the first week. Another packed day was waiting for us. The day’s first speaker was Kadir Şener, Windows & Devices Business Group Leader. He briefly covered his background, his high-school and university years, his memories from the U.S., and finally Windows 10 and IoT technologies. He particularly stressed that for a product to sell, three traits have to dominate — a reasonable price, good design and elegance.

After a short break, Osman Çokakoğlu — TCM Business Solutions Manager and MS SQL Server MVP — walked us through the history of the .NET Framework, what it has brought to the table, and how usage of older versions will inevitably trail off over time.

The next presentation continued with Senior Software Engineer Muhammed Medeni Baykal, also from TCM. Here we got the chance to see the concepts from the previous session applied in practice. We wrote a few simple console applications and got a feel for the kinds of errors we’d run into there.

And the day’s most gift-laden guest was Hande Kayadeniz Torkan, MVP Program Manager for Microsoft Middle East & Africa (MEA). In this part we picked up details on who MVPs are, what they do and how that title is earned — and a few gifts were handed out along the way. Sitting in the back during Q&A, I called out a number loud enough to be heard, and one of those gifts ended up being mine 😀