Heros Happen Here (Denver edition).

3/20/2008.

I went to the Denver session of MS's 'Hero's Happen Here' Visual Studio 2008 promotional tour on Thursday. It was a very nice day out. (Sunny, 60 degrees, somewhat breezy). I hadn't been Downtown in a while so I took the time to grab some Bruegger's bagels on 17th, and some Anthony's pizza on California. Yum!

I took the light rail in and it was pretty packed. Standing room only from the Southmoor Station to Downtown at 7 something in the morning and just as packed on the way back at 4 something in the afternoon. The light rail seems quite popular.

Random notes:

I'd guess there were about 500 - 2000 people at the convention.

It was at the Colorado Convention Center, where the Democratic National Convention is going to be this August.



When I got home that night I tried to install Visual Studio 2008 on my computer and I got an error. There was a problem setting up the .NET Frameworks 3.0 and 3.5 apparently. I downloaded them separately and tried to run them individually. From the error log:

Windows Communication Foundation: [2] Error: Installation failed for component Windows Communication Foundation. MSI returned error code 1603

Fixed above by uninstalling IIS then reinstalling IIS after setting everything up.

Did a Hello World form in C# on VS 2008 and it worked.

I heard Coldplay on the speakers during an intermission. Yuck. Better than U2 I guess.

Walked by one session and the speaker tried to pump the crowd, 'How many of you are excited today?' and got a halfhearted 'yeah' cheer out of them.

At the business intelligence session I went to, one of the presenters got no rows back on a query that he expected data from and he couldn't figure out what happened. Another time the same guy had to re-boot his computer. He handled it pretty smoothly though.

Went to a session on development with MS Office. You can create add on's to MS Word in VS 2008. Don't know if you could do that before but it's probably easier now. In one of the examples, the speaker created a tab in Word so that a user writing a document can get information from the database. Nice enough I suppose, I don't know how useful this is.