Overall Value of Time Spent and Benefits Derived:

As a super quick executive summary (I will provide longer descriptions of the events that I attended) it was a very beneficial, productive day, and I'm very happy to have gone. The information was top notch and well presented, and (as Mark Relph mentioned in the comments) there was the benefit of the free copy of SQL Server 2005 Standard Edition (you also get VS2005 Standard Edition, but most devs already have a development-legal copy of a better version of that via MSDN. The SQL Server can actually be used in production, or so I am led to believe). I'm writing this as someone who has been using Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 in various incarnations for quite a long time - I've actually given corporate presentations on the benefits that SQL Server 2005 brings to the table. Nonetheless, I still found the session very valuable.

As always, they gave out pens and notepads. Why are the branded pens they give out at these sorts of events always the cheapest, worst pens that money can buy (or maybe that you don't even need money to buy)? I realize that the obvious answer is "because they're cheaper", but I really think that's the wrong place to save money. When I'm sitting there looking at your branding on a pen, and it's tearing through paper with its rusted, cubical, ultra-cheap nib, it rubs off poorly on your brand: I'm correlating something cheap and shoddy with your brand. Pony up for some nice gel pens or something.

All of these pictures were shot on a little P&S Sony DSC-P150, and to avoid being a jerk they were all shot with the flash disabled. It's remarkable that most of them turned out as well as they did (I've gotten good at being remarkably still when taking the shot). I didn't want to be a pretend-journo with the digital SLR, though the ISO 1600 and much brighter lens would have been very beneficial in this environment.

It is amazing how long it takes to drive anywhere in Toronto. Given that the Launch Tour here in town was hosted beside the airport, driving was the only real option (versus being at the TO convention center, which would have been a much more convenient GO commuter train ride). I left at 7:30 in the morning, and still didn't get there until 9:15am. Thankfully getting through registration and into the keynote was a breeze, and I really didn't miss anything.

Getting the day started. Yes, this car is a mess. It's a 225,000km commuter car that has served me well.


Since I'd never been to the congress center. I accidentally printed the maps on 8 1/2 x 11 glossy photo paper, but the quality of the printout was superb.


The Microsoft Canada mothership, visible en route


Parked in Section 10


Registration (or rather scanning of online pre-registrations). Here you receive a little nametag necklace, in which you place your printed registration.


Keynote


Keynote. 7 screens, all about 9'x7'. Remarkably they all are bright and clear. While there are empty seats evident, this was due to the very large number of late arrivals - the place was packed to the brim at the halfway point.


Keynote. While Biztalk appeared in many of the slides, at all of the presentations I went to it was largely MIA - barely mentioned. That makes sense given that it doesn't actually come out until next year, so I wonder why it was included with the branding of this event: Did they originally think they could pull it off and release it now when they originally planned this?


HMV is using it. Why aren't you? BTW: Have you heard about HMVs online music store?


Trusted Business Platform


Intel vs AMD (a 32-way Intel box is used to demonstrate the high-end, and a 4-way AMD Opteron is used to show the immense power available even on a "low-end" box, in this case servicing 18,000 simultaneous SAP users)


Quick Break


Ask The Experts

[Launch2005]

AdSense, for those living under a rock, is advertising revenue for the little guy - You display Google ads on your micro-site, and Google gives you a piece of the action. It's the reason you see those "Ads by Goooooooooogle" all over the place, and it really changed the landscape of the web: Previously the only monetary action on the low-end was referral type activity (e.g. GoToMyPC or Amazon books).

Given the proliferation of click-fraud, I was sure that AdSense would go the way of the dodo, or would see significant changes, and I wasn't alone. Surprising, then, when I see that Google has now spread out to a referral system as well, where once you sign up for AdSense (use that handy button up above!), you can refer others and start, err, monetizing their income to a small amount as well. Of course Google's business plan with AdSense largely revolves around their $100 minimum payout (which relates to referrals as well): Millions upon millions of small sites and dreamy blogs get into the Google Adsense game, displaying billions of ads, and the reality is that the overwhelming majority of them will never hit $100. They'll never need to be paid.

Pretty sweet deal for Google. Unfortunately it's yet another incentive for the spammers and miscreants, and you can expect to see advertisements even more pervasively than the current glut. When will Google's honeymoon end?

Mark Relph, of Microsoft Canada fame, left a couple of comments under "Blogging from Launch Tour 2005" regarding the software, and connectivity. Should find out about the connectivity issue later today.

[Launch2005]

As mentioned previously, I plan on "blogging" about, or possibly even from, the Toronto instance of Launch Tour 2005 this coming Tuesday. Unfortunately I've yet to hear if there is any sort of public connectivity at the venue (I sent an email to Mark Relph this morning, but alas - no reply. Maybe one just needs to blog about these things nowadays to get any respect - Mark, if you read this tell me if there's connectivity there. Thanks!), and I don't plan on using my exorbitant cell data rate for uploading pictures, so we'll see. It may not be posted until that evening. We'll see.

On another note, apparently the Canadian audience will be given "special editions" of the Standard Edition of SQL Server 2005 and Visual Studio 2005 (what's special about them? Maybe some sort of license clause like "don't do anything commercial with it"). I'm not quite sure why this even matters, as presumably most of the audience will already have it via the MSDN library. Freebies at events are usually a bad thing as they draw people for all of the wrong reasons - I hated being at Comdex LV and trying to get real info, but instead you're fighting with throngs of geeks trying desperately to get a free $5-value t-shirt (coupled with exhibitors that built their entire presentation around giveaways. Yeah, I flew here so I could get a free pen and a tote bag emblazoned with some embarrassing logo).

Mark needs a better digital camera I think.

[Launch2005]

I do make use of the blog categories to try to limit the amount of out-of-band content general readers need to endure. For instance I'll often put .NET code tips only in the .NET section, and SQL code tips only in the SQL section. When they are very specific technology specific items, I don't propagate them to the home page either, so you'll only see them in those categories.

I mention this only because I know some readers interested in SQL or .NET specific stuff only subscribed to the root RSS feed, and unfortunately they'll miss some of the content that way. For them I'd recommend subscribing to both the root feed along with the category specific feeds.

I mentioned the Microsoft Live "gadget" competition derisively on Tuesday - where they're giving away a couple of xbox360s to the creators of the best gadgets, trying to entice some extremely cheap labour (split the marginal prize cost amongst the hundreds who'll probably take the challenge to win themselves a game system). Of course Microsoft is doing it to try to make their platform viable.

Firefox is getting into the game too: Develop the best extensions to go with Firefox 1.5, and you could win from a collection of prizes. It is sort of remarkable that the Mozilla Foundation prizes are so much richer than the Microsoft prizes - e.g. three absolutely top of the class gaming computer rigs as the grand prizes, versus I believe 4 xboxes, worth 1/5th the amount, from Microsoft (you would think Microsoft would at least pony up for a year of MSDN Universal or something for the winners). The Firefox competition also has impressive category winning bounties, including an iPod Nano and a $250 gift certificate.

Of course many enter these sorts of competitions not for the prizes, but rather for the prestige. For these people the prizes are almost an insult.

For the prospective competitors, in the Firefox case there is already a rich ecosystem of very impressive extensions, so you can go into that knowing that you're starting with a proven, rich platform. In Microsoft Live's case, there is a measly 8 existing gadgets, and they're a little weak. I'm always suspicious when organizations unleash that sort of platform on the world, because their lack of experience trying to use it in real world scenarios means that it is almost certain v1.0-borked - e.g. you can expect a complete rework and rewrite as people explore the edge cases, and discover all of the things that simply cannot be accomplished with the infrastructure they've developed. If you're a developer, you've probably been handed that sort of "framework" from a coworker, with grand promises of extraordinary extensibility, but in reality it's useless in the real world because they never actually used it for anything of consequence themselves.

I will be at the Canadian Launch Tour for Visual Studio 2005/SQL Server 2005 (at the Congress Centre in Toronto) on November 8th, and will post notes and photos about it (hopefully as it happens). I'm looking forward to it, and maybe I'll see some of you there.

If there was one thing that Microsoft keeps doing that I wish they'd stop is the whole "most important/biggest/impressive release ev4r!". I'm reading some of the Microsoft bloggers make this claim, and it just rings so false - I am very excited about both of these products, and my experience with them thus far (and through the beta and CTP cycle) has been very positive, but it's very cry-wolfish of Microsoft to declare every release the most important ever to try to gain extra attention. A part of the reason Microsoft Live was accepted so cynically was all of the "great new turn-on-a-dime strategy!" B.S. coming out of Redmond.

Remember to visit tomorrow (tomorrow relative to today no matter what day you read this) for yafla's Most Important Blog Posting Ever!

[Launch2005]