Visual Studio 2005 Ready Launch - Cape Town

So I went to the Visual Studio 2005, SQL Server 2005 and BizTalk Server 2006 Ready Launch at Thunder City today (and yes, they did keep calling it that throughout the presentation, even though it's a bit of a mouthful - and if I hear the word "absolutely" one more time, I'm going to scream).

It was pretty cool - far more of a marketing event than a tech event like DevDays, but the setup was pretty good. It was in the main (empty) hangar at Thunder City, and they had really loud music and fog machines misting up the hangar at first, so it was really impressive. Things quieted down a bit once they started; Ed Jordan was the MC, with some comedian guy (I forget his name), who was really funny at times, but, at other times, not so much.

There's not really a lot to say about the presentations - in fact, I tuned out through most of it as it was very vague wishy-washy marketing hype like "more productive" and "improved peformance" with lots of "integrated" and "interface"s dropped in. So there's probably better comment on this over at dotnet.org.za.

But here are a couple of my thoughts:

In the very beginning, they played a video clip of Steve Ballmer saying how great this launch is. I was half-expecting someone to shout out "Google", or "Hide the chairs!". But this crowd was either too polite or too microsoft oriented to do that, unfortunatley :-(

They played another clip of how HMV absolutely love MS and are using their products for everything including their digital download service. Despite lots of comments about digital downloads, they didn't use the word MP3 once, and the only device they showed playing these digital downloads were not iPods (I think they were the Creative Zen, but I'm not sure). Similarly, BB&D, one of their partners, was running a competition to win MP3 players - again, not an iPod in sight :-)

They made a big deal about how SQL Server Express is now available for free, and you can just download it free. And that Visual Studio Express is also available via a free download for a limited period. I don't think they realised that they're in South Africa - either we're on dial-up, and can't download anything larger than a meg or two; or we're on a hard-capped ADSL line and don't dare download anything large if we want to have any bandwidth left for e-mail and surfing.

From a tech point of view, they showed how integrated SQL Server and Visual Studio have become - Query Analyzer and Enterprise Manager are now integrated into a Visual Studio style app, and - this is cool - you can simply drag and drop stored procs into your code! And can then set breakpoints and debug your stored procs! You can also - and this I have my doubts about - call .Net code from your stored proc. In the demo, they put a call to a webservice into a stored proc, which just doesn't seem like a very good idea to me.

I took some pictures on my cellphone camera, but they all turned out pretty badly. If I get a bunch of comments clamouring for photos, I'll post them, but somehow that seems fairly unlikely :P

Update: I hear that in the US, everyone got CDs containing Visual Studio 2005 Standard Edition - free. We got a 90-day trial version of VS2005 Pro :-( Yeah, that makes a lot of sense - in a First World, large country where exchange rate isn't an issue and where you probably make most of your sales, give away your product free. In a 3rd world developing country where the exchange rate is horrible and which probably isn't a major market for you anyway, hand out 90-day trial CDs. The mind boggles.

But, all is not lost. I mentioned above that you can download SQL Server Express - if you attended the launch and got your 90-day trial of VS 2005 Pro CDs, you have SSE already! Just go to CD2, go to the WCU folder and you'll see a folder named SSE. This seems to contain both the 64-bit and 32-bit editions of SQL Server Express (although you have to uninstall all Betas to be able to install it, so it may not be worth it if you're still using VS2005 Beta 2 - when do these betas expire, anyway?)

And of course these CDs contain the .Net Framework 2.0, which should also save you some bandwidth. The SQL Server 2005 MSDN dvd also seems to contain the msdn not only for SQL Server, but also for VS2005, which should save you even more bandwidth (I'm assuming that while the SQL Server install on the CD is limited to a 180-day trial, the msdn stuff isn't. This may or may not be a reasonable assumption.)

But while they claimed that they couldn't distribute SSE and the VSE editions on CD because it would be too much admin, they did manage to distribute a Ready Launch CD containing, from the look of it, a bunch of marketing brochures as .pdf from themselves and their Launch partners.

What I would have liked to see, instead, is a real breakdown of the differences between the different VS2005 editions. Not the fluffy, hand-wavy "this one's aimed at hobbyists, and this one's for serious developers, and this one's for big companies"; definitive "this includes xxx while this one doesn't" kind of thing.