I attended as speaker the Bigdays Austria. My session was 360° Visual Studio which I made with Max Knor from Microsoft. Our goal was to give in 70 minutes a complete overview and to code five samples which have a story line. In sum we had ~1000 attendees in our session. Bigdays is a kind of roadshow in four cities.
Story: new community for developers. Key points: Photo, name, preferedlanguages stored in XML file.
I did everything with VB and Max used C#.
Lesson learned: more than half of audience are using 2008 and less then 20% use VB :-(
1) Sample: Web page with Listview, LINQ2XML, AJAX AlwaysvisibleControlextender
Lesson learned: audience love it, nearly everbody is thinking about web development
2) Sample by Max: WCF with REST which shows developers depending URI
Lesson learned: only few people are using WCF right now. Even less knows about REST or JSON.
3) Sample by Max: codeless list with WPF, Pictures, Border, Text
Lesson learned: only 1 % have used WPF, Audience miss better UI support ( eg Databinding) in Visual Studio. Max did it pure XAML and audience don't like it.
4) Sample dropped: Windows Mobile: plan was to shoot pictures live and upload it to WCF service. Not enough time, cool sample
Lesson learned: there is so much to tell about Visual Studio 2008.
5) Sample VSTO: Use Smart Tags to display picture of developers in Word document.
Lesson learned: not enough time to code. Only drag an drop of code snippet from toolbar was possible. After running the sample I could feel the "aha" in the room. Was something complete new which I believe have nobody seen before.
So back to my question
Where we are?
Visual Studio 2008 is a quite useful tool for the job. You can do more with it than even before. This would the chance to make upselling to our customers to offer eg alternative UI like mobile, web or WPF. The problem is we have not enough Microsoft minded developers.