Ready to Rock now?

Hope everyone in Calgary had a great time at the launch event yesterday. It was a blast and we had a lot of fun hanging out in the Cabana, answering questions, mocking up crazy architectures on the fly, and generally having a great time. It's always cool when so many people get together with the same interests (even if it does rank way up there on the geek meter). I got there pretty early so wandered around until things got setup. The keynote was fun (complete with various pokes at Oracle) and the day went by pretty quickly.

Lunchtime rolled around and I swear I still don't know the intention of the whole sandwich thing. I mean, it said "Three 1/2 sandwiches per person limit". Now is that 3.5 sandwiches or 3 separate 1/2 sandwiches? It still bugs me today but I'll get over it. A few cool prizes were given out (including a "We'll mail you an XBox 360 for one lucky guy" prize as there were no units available at the show).

Although by now you've gone through your swag and maybe need to go back and visit it again. Why? Because not only did everyone get a free copy of Visual Studio 2005 Standard Edition AND a copy of SQL Server 2005 Standard Edition you also got a certificate for a free Microsoft exam (five choices to pick from) which you can use towards a MS certification. That's a value of $150 bucks. Sweet deal.

Anyways, it's out there. John Bristowe is off to various other places for the remainder of the month to finish off the tour. We'll be recording our second episode of the DotNetPlumbers podcast show tonight so hopefully he'll recover enough for next weeks trips.

Like I said, it was a great time (even if we did look like WalMart employees). You can check out all the pictures from the Calgary VS 2005 Launch here.