I was at the "Heroes Happen Here" launch event for Visual Studio 2008 and a bunch of other software that still lags behind open source offerings. I knew we were getting free software (Visual Studio 2008, SQL Server 2008, Windows 2008) but I didn't know we were getting Vista. It was a pleasant surprise because now when games start coming out that only work on Vista, I'm ready and don't have to spend $400. And that's all I have to say about that. Thanks Microsoft!

It was generally a good time. Four of us from work. We got there and registered with 40 minutes left to go until the first event, so we headed out to the Reading Terminal Market for lunch. It's across the street from where the event was hosted, at 12th and Market (Marriot). Mark lost his sunglasses so went back to get them while we went to the market. We ended up going to Famous Frank's near the Beer Garden, and then ate at the Beer Garden. You have to buy beer in order to eat there, which we did. Mark doesn't drink, so I said if he gets accosted about having to buy beer, I suggested he just buy one, put it in front of him, and I'll drink it. He didn't, but a couple got thrown out before he got there because they weren't boozin.

We left and went to the first show, which we were late for. It was my friend and former coworker, Danilo Diaz, giving the first developer track talk. After that, we got our free software, checked in with the second talk, and left after 10 minutes because it was general crap.

During the first talk, it was stuff that all of us have done already. The only interesting feature about 2008 and .NET 3.5 is Lambda expressions (which I'm not even really impressed with), and they weren't even covered. Way to go Dan :P We were talking through a lot of it. When he showed the Javascript debugger in Visual Studio 2008, everyone cheered, and I said, kinda loud, "Firebug!!". Some dudes behind me laughed. I was texting a coworker stuck back at the office, checking if I could get internet on my iPod, and just generally being a jackass. I was there for the free shit. We learned nothing new. Everything that was covered, one of the four of us have already done, and it's just like "Oh, yeah, look at this code in source safe, and here's some other hints about it." I don't know one person who (besides my Java friends :P) hasn't done ASP.NET AJAX and used UpdatePanels. It certainly didn't need all that time to go over it.

Oh well, Danilo works at Microsoft now, and I've never been impressed with their code examples or presentations, so I guess that just comes with the territory. Do they say "Keep it short and don't cover interesting stuff" ? I don't know, there might have been people there that haven't seen that stuff. Who knows. Maybe I'm just at a very technologically advanced company. That could very well be it, but I can't understand, then, why I've been doing PHP for the past two months :)

Other than that it was a good time. It helps when you're like best friends with the people you work with.

Thanks for Vista, suckers.