InstallFest

A couple buddies and I had a pretty cool adventure yesterday.  We went to the Microsoft offices in Pittsburgh for the release of Visual Studio 2008, an event called InstallFest (I can hear the collective groan from all of the non-geeks that read this now.)

This was a cool event mostly because I got to hang out with my friend Rich Dudley from Armada Supply Chain Solutions.  I was contracted with them for a while before moving to Giant Eagle, Inc.

Anyway, I met up with Rich at the Armada offices where we got to hang around and talk a little, catch up on old times and what not.

We then got on the road to Microsoft.  I followed Rich over, as I had never been to the MS offices before.  If you've never been to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, you must understand a few things.  It is the hardest city to get around in and is easy to get lost.  Traffic patterns make no sense and there is no grid, like in a "normal" city.  Pittsburgh is centered around the confluence of three rivers (there is a rumored fourth, underground, river, but we'll stick to the three you can see.)  This confluence of three rivers gives the city an interesting landscape, since the rivers form a Y in the middle of the city.  Along with the three rivers you have a TON of bridges (There are more bridges in Pittsburgh than any other city in the world) and mountains.

All of that being said, the trip there was pretty non-eventful, other than me almost getting run over by a 16 wheeler who was going to make that turn no matter what.  He missed me by an inch or so, and my car and I both thank the driver for being so... so... observant.

InstallFest, for all intents and purposes, was about swag.  We went into the building, signed in, took the elevator up to the offices, signed in to the event, got our little name tags.  Then we received our T-Shirt, "WhirleyThing", install disks of VS 2008 Express, our VS 2008 sticker and finally, the coup de grace, the full blown copy of Visual Studio 2008 Professional Version!  Yes, this was only the 60 day trial, but we got a code to get a license key that would unlock the full glory of the development environment.

Then the fun began!  We all pulled out our laptops and started to install VS 2008!  Yes, it took 1.5 hours to get it installed, but during the time it took to install we got to hang out with Dani Diaz, one of Microsoft's Visual Studio .Net Evangelists.  Dani is an awesome guy.  He got to show us some of the cool features of the IDE and talked about some of the other events that he was taking place in.

All-in-all it was a great time.  The next time they hold an event at the MS Offices, if it's a topic I'm interested in, I'll be there.  This one was well worth the $4 that it cost to park, and it saved me a bunch of money on buying VS 2008.

If you are interested in seeing VS 2008 in action, or getting some info about it check out this site.