Well after attending Connect Technical Session, I duly collected my Visual Studio 2005 (and other stuff).
Tonight I installed VS2005 and I have to say it went without a hitch. It told me I had the RTM of Visual Studio 2005 installed, and showed me a URL with instruction to uninstall it. I ran the uninstall program, and it just worked. 50 minutes after that I have VS2005 and MSDN installed.
Thoughts after playing in my Curse of the Azure Bonds project, seems faster. Not actually sure of timing, but pause while it parsed the error list (for all 1500 errors) feels shorter.
Thoughts from my first Microsoft event…
It was cool. I was surprised by the number of attendees. While Craig and I were talking at the end, the key note speaker Jonathan Tom came up and talked to us. We had been talking about the new features, and how it will be hard to get them adopted because most of our work is on going evolution of our core product. Craig was also interested in the push of BI, Jonathan been a Senior Product Manger SQL Server Marketing was happy to talk about these things. It was cool that he chatted with us, so I tried asking a tricky question about the role of BI as leverage to sell/upgrade people verse extending the power to users. Been the marking guy he was he had a solid and respectful answer to both natures of the question.
The best session for me was Darryl’s Smart Client talk. While I’d seen the parts demoed before, it was nice to see him whip it all together. He also had good stage presence, and tried to redeem his name after the Wayne’s slander in the Team System talk. (Note for Darryl: remember to look into my issues with the Connections Site)
Other than the PA system bang, and Jonathan falling off the stage, it all went well.