Heroes Happen Here!

Well, everyone, yesterday was the Pittsburgh Heroes Happen Here launch event for Visual Studio 2008, Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008.  

All in all, it was a lot of fun.  I got to hang out with some friends, meet some new ones and hand out a lot of business cards.  We also got some pretty nice swag.  Check out me holding the cooler that we received, and it was full of food! 

There were three presenters for the developer track.  All three of them were very informative.  They ranged from ASP.Net, AJAX and the AJAX Toolkit to Office Development and WPF. 

The most interesting part of the day occurred before we even arrived at the event.  Apparently, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton decided to show up at a United Steel Workers Union conference that was happening at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center, which is attached by a skyway to the Westin Convention Center (the location of Heroes Happen Here).  So my buddies and I decided to leave for the event early to combat the traffic which we were anticipating, and to accommodate the potential walk that we could have.

Well, could have a walk turned into did have a walk.  We parked by PNC Park, the home of the Pittsburgh Pirates.  For those of you who don't know, the Pirates are actually a Major League Baseball team.  About 15 years ago they were actually pretty good, but ever since then they have become the minor league team for the rest of the league.   PNC Park, in distance, isn't that far away from the convention center, but you do have to cross the Allegheny River, and walk about 10 blocks.  It's wasn't too bad, but it would have been really nice to have been able to park in the garage that is, you know, ATTACHED TO THE CONVENTION CENTER.

That really is my only real complaint about the day. All in all, it was pretty cool.  We did walk away with some nice swag and some good information.  The swag included:

• The pictured cooler
• Visual Studio 2008 Standard
• Windows Server 2008
• SQL Server 2008
• Windows Vista Ultimate (not expected)

For all of the things that people can fault Microsoft for, the one thing that you have to say is that they know how to do a launch event and make it work.  If only the presidential candidates would have come a day earlier or a day later my calves would be hurting nearly as bad as they are today.