Dallas VS 2005 Launch

The Visual Studio 2005 Launch in Dallas was almost two weeks ago. Yes, SQL Server 2005, and BizTalk 2006 were launch at the same time, but for me, it was all about VS. My talk went well, although there were a couple of “hick-ups” with the demos. Visual Studio croaked on me three times during one demo… as it turns out the VPC was build with the CTP version (Community Technology Preview) of SQL Server (not the RTM final release) and so it was conflicting with Visual Studio when I tried to do a SQL Assembly in VS. What a let down, that is such a cool demo when it works. BTW – if you are using the final release of everything fine! So, there I am (in front of 2000 people) restarting Visual Studio three times, very frustrating.

Everyone got to see Visual Studio’s quick recovery features, that is, it restarts FAST from a drop like that, it even picked up exactly where I had left it. Most of the comments to me afterwords were very positive (?), I guess. People said stuff to me like, “way to tap dance”, “good recovery”, “you handled that blow up great”… not exactly what you *want* to hear after a talk in front of a crowd of 2000.

So, here’s the funny part. Less than four hours later I arrive home and turn on my computer, almost immediately I get an IM from a friend in CANADA; CANADA! He says, “so I hear that you had some blow up at your launch. (!) Yeah, bless the Internet, he read about it from some entry over at Geeks with blogs. So he didn’t know that it was my demo that had locked up a couple of times, but still that was great.

Oh well, at least *I* didn’t puke on stage. Lovely.