Hey, a slightly dramatic post. Haven’t had one of those in awhile. As always, skip this if you don’t like reading that type of stuff, friendly readers.

Just received the following comment to my Visual Studio 2005 Ready To Launch notes (RTL):

I was sent this link by Microsoft after I requested direction to the Launch 2005 demo of Visual Studio Team System. This not only does not fulfill my need, I see extremely little information of value to anyone. I’ll go back to Microsoft again…

You can read my specific reply, which one of my friends said was too harsh. He’s right. Sorry, Chris if I came off like an a-hole. Really, I try not to disrespect people who comment, but Mr. Anacker’s comment reminded me again of precisely what did and didn’t work at this recent event for our business. Is this selfish to write about what works and doesn’t work for my business? I don’t think so of course, which is why I published my notes.

Will these notes be useful for everybody? Of course not. They can’t be. But was my information of “extremely little value to anyone?” Disagree strongly.

I wished I had done more recon looking for what others felt about this event: what was useful, worthwhile, poorly presented, etc? What tracks should I attend? Was the keynote any good? These were all questions that I wondered so I could maximize the time by attending the tracks, talking to the vendors, etc. so that I could find how to slot these new Microsoft products into our business.

My friend, Lestat, just posted his opinion of the VS 2005 Ready To Launch Tour event in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Green Bay attendees didn’t get box lunch paid, so I should thank Microsoft for the good roast beef sandwich (I liked it, really):

I must say my interest was captivated for the afternoon. After the session, there were the prize drawings, of which I didn’t win anything. Oh well. Of course the true benifit, was that after the 2nd session, we got to get in line for our free SQL/Studio 05 software AGAIN!

Not sure I’d have traded my roast beef box lunch for a additional copy of VS 2005 standard, but hey, to each his own. They punched our badges after we filled out and turned in a questionaire and received our CD at the end of the event.

The three key things I took away from this event
1) .NET 2.0 apps aren’t available on most web hosts yet and it might be as much as a year or more before most are up to speed.
2) The goodies in VS 2005 cannot be used with .NET 1.0, 1.1 apps, they need to be imported.
3) The event was not targeted for smaller/independent developers, it was for the larger corporate development clients.

There is nothing wrong with #3, of course, if you are a larger corporate client. Microsoft can target whomever they want with their launched, but I’d be willing to wager of the thousands of attendees most of them were not large corporate clients.

An audience full of men and women are targeted. Hmm is right.

Something valuable I learned a long time ago: write what you know. Sure, I could write about Team System programming but the reality is I rarely do Team System programming and have only done a small few team projects ever; just not our business. So me writing about the Team System environment would be much less valuable then somebody who lives, works and breathes the Team System environment. Heck, I’d be better off linking out. Any readers who are Team System enviropros?

If what Mr. Anacker wrote was accurate that someone from “Microsoft” in fact sent him here looking for “direction” to the Launch 2005 demo of Visual Studio Team System (which frankly I find hard a little hard to believe), the only real direction I can give is to Google it, er, I mean MSN it, of course.

My original posted notes I did wonder about a project telecommuted across continents? I have programming friends across the world so maybe we could get together on a .NET 2.0 project using this Team System and then I’d have much more to say on the subject?

Here’s what I think really happened. Mr. Anacker was sent somewhere for a non-Microsofty (that’s me) giving an honest opinion on the Team System developer track at a recent RTL event. I took more pictures and have more detail than was posted in my original notes and could post more, I suppose.

The reality is that I’m not all that interested in doing so at the present time, sorry. If other readers are interested in more of these notes and pictures then please let me know in the comments. Otherwise, this stuff might end up in the B file.

This weekend I’m hoping to go through the package of RTL goodies and swag I picked up from the event (pictured above) and maybe I’ll blog about some of those contents in the coming days.

Now here’s something I should have said — my bad, sorry — to Mr. Anacker: thank you for reading and stopping by and hopefully something here will make you go hmm.

Did this post make you go hmm?

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