Karim's space

Wooohooo, I won the blogging contest for the 80gb Zune :)

I would like to thank all of you who made this possible:
-My lovely fiance, without her understanding, I would not have been able to attend (since I skipped seeing her that night to be at the event)
-CNUG, without your wonderful community, chicagoland would not be nearly as fun for a geek like me
-Microsoft, for launching such an AWESOME product, it truly is Jaw-dropping (to say the least)
-To my writers, oh wait, no, they're on strike (and the fact that I don't have any, doesnt help either..LOL)

Karim

Okay, all I can say, was that the event was AWESOME.....
I am, in fact, wearing my Visual Studio 2008 t-shirt today :)

The event started off with everyone grabbing a copy of vs08
and installing, everyone who attended got a key, to get a free
copy of vs08 pro when it hits the shelves (MS will ship it to us).
Afterwards there were some really good demo sessions, which
of course highlighted all of the COOLEST new features in vs08.

As far as the new features, I think WPF alone is worth the upgrade,
but once you add in the unit testing, there is NO question, that you NEED
to upgrade. The advancements in vs08 are so great in fact, that I'm coming
back over from pushing PHP for every project we get, to actually (I just
did this 2 days ago in fact), suggesting our developers use ASP.NET
AJAX to build a site (Needless to say, everyone who knows me, is like
"Uh, dude, why all the love for Microsoft all of a sudden?".

Anyways, I'm droning on and on here.... One final thing to say though,
Visual Studio 2008 Loadfest, if you haven't been to one yet, GO!
if you know someone who didn't go, recommend that they do... it was
TONS of fun, and best of all ( ..you know whats coming) ... FREE COPY
of Visual Studio :) (w00t)