What an amazing day it was.  As a local MVP I was asked to participate in the Experts Cabana.  Which is simply an area in which a bunch of us so-called experts stand around and help people with questions.  Imagine regional directors, product managers, presenters, and even members of the actual product teams combined with MVP's and local experts all in one designated area.  A pretty amazing resource to have at your disposal and I do highly recommend taking advantage of the opportunity if you are in a city that has yet to have the launch event.

The biggest question I was asked, probably about a dozen times, is if VS.NET 2k3 and VS.NET 2k5 can co-exist on the same machine for development.  The answer is YES.  Now I heard so many war stories yesterday about installing and uninstalling beta and RC versions of 2005 and how many issues people found with that.  All we could do is recommend people to use the uninstall tool (here is a nice page on it) and if your still having some major issues quite simple do a complete rebuild of your machine.  It's one of the expected issues with installing any sort of beta software.  Next time consider using Virtual PC or something.  A huge "nice to have" about having both versions on the same box is that when you install 2k5 it actually installs this "Microsoft Visual Studio Version Selector" and associates that with the .SLN extension.  What it does, is when you launch a solution file that stub will determine the solution type (either the old school format or the new msbuild format) and then launch the correct version of VS.NET for you.  I know with the beta's and such it was a pain when you wanted to launch 2k3 for a given solution and it would force you into 2k5 and jump right into the Upgrade Wizard. 

Feedback from the attendees was all very positive.  The event was not your typical marketing fluff that we are all so used to with this sort of event.  People found that the content was just scratching the surface but did an awesome job.

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