Hi,

So the event of the year finally took place :-) It feels as though I have been preparing for this event forever.

The Expression around the Clock event kicked off in New Zealand, followed by Korea, India and Russia, then we hit Egypt where I was presenting. The event took place during Ramadan and everyone was a little worried how this would affect the attendee numbers, however we had a full house, and more importantly a full house of designers :-) This trend continued to the other locations, Italy, Switzerland, Brazil, Mexico and finally Canada. For me this was by far the best news. Since starting this role as a UXE, I have been pushing for us to run an exclusive designer event, rather than a developer event with a designer workstream which is what we had been doing - wrong audience, wrong event in my book.

I was hugely excited to finally get the go ahead to run a designer event, however to be honest I was a little concerned launching our first designer event on such a large scale - would we get the attendees? Turns out the answer is YES :-) This event was all about showing what Microsoft can bring to this industry, we had a fantastic line-up of keynote speakers - all working within UX/design at Microsoft. Followed by live demonstrations of Blend, including demoing the designer - developer workflow, plus third party presentations from Erain, UPA and local design agencies. In addition we also demonstrated some of Microsoft's new products, such as Surface and Photosynth - very cool.

The feedback so far has been fantastic, I'm sure some of the attendees came with a view to mock us, however even they have to agree that the Microsoft produce stack is impressive. Now you may think I am just saying this because I work for Microsoft, on the contrary, trust me when I don't like something I make it known. As above we are still running developer events with a designer workstream - WHY - I will continue this rant on a different blog entry. But please believe me when I say I am genuinely impressed with Expression Blend.

If you are interested in finding out more about this event, including watching webcasts of the presentations, please visit: http://www.microsoft.com/expression/events-training/globalevent/default.html