The Toronto Visual Studio 2005 Launch Rocked!
Kudos to the people from Microsoft Canada for putting on a great event.
I spent the pre-keynote part of the day talking with people at the user group booth. Myself and other group leaders were representing the 10 groups for developers and IT Pros in and around the city. I had some business cards made up with the group names and URLs on one side and the MSDN and INETA logos on the reverse. These worked really well because they were easy to distribute both at the booth and elsewhere around the event.
After the keynote I headed over to the Ask the Experts Cabana where I spent most of the day. Things were pretty busy during the first lunch session (TechNet) and they got very busy during the second (MSDN) lunch. It was a cool surpise to see that in additon to local experts (MVPs, RDs, and people from MSDN Canada), we had several product team members up from Redmond to help answer questions.
I spent most of my time around the Visual Studio experts but there were lots of SQL Server and BizTalk experts in the other parts of the room. On the Visual Studio side the hot topic was Team System so our VSTS go-to-guy Adam Gallant always had a crowd around him.
As the second lunch period finished the room thinned out but several attendees hung around to continue discussions through the final breakout session. Anthony Vranic had a group of six or seven people huddled around an impromptu mini-session on Windows Communication Foundation (a.k.a. Indigo).
I finished the day on stage with the presenters and several other experts for a panel Q and A session. I was surprised that many of the questions related to SQL Server since there was a TechNet Q and A going on in the other room. This a technology where the developer/IT Pro lines blur.
All-in-all it was a great day. I'm looking forward to seeing the video from the sessions and reading the email and blog posts with other peoples reactions to the event.
Tags: [Launch2005]