Microsoft held another launch event and since I enjoyed attending the last one I decided to go. The first event I wanted to attend was full so I had to settle for another one. It was a fairly sad introduction to Vista and Office 2007. They kept focusing on unimportant eye-candy, but they didn’t really talk about any of the features that will improve your actual productivity.

They kept using keywords and slogans and they just said ‘these new releases will increase security and productivity while keeping things easy to use” but they never actually went into detail. The most we really saw of Vista is what we saw in between presentations as the demo machine was running it. However, I’m not sure what laptop they had but Vista was running perfectly.

Because of what I do I’ll eventually need to get Vista, but I am eager to play around with it as well. I received a free standard edition of Office 2007 for attending (otherwise I would never have gone), so I’ll be playing with that. I don’t use any of the Office applications much anymore except Excel. I use Word for project contracts, but that’s about it – the rest of my documents are created in Google Documents.

I played with the Office 2007 beta last year and was fairly impressed, so I’m excited to have a copy that is more stable and is actually a final product. Now, if they would have just given me a copy of Vista I’d be set!

Whew! Today I left the house at 6:05 and spent the entire day over at the Microsoft Launch demonstrations of SQL Server 2005 and Visual Studio 2005. Both presentations were more like tutorials than marketing and both lasted four hours each. Overall I enjoyed the content and got some free software out if it too. I had fun, so much that I’m going to pay attention to what shows Microsoft does here in Portland in the future, because they mentioned that they come by every few months for something else. The best part of all of this is that both sessions were free.

They provide completely free, fully-licensed versions of the software they discuss, as well a DVD of goodies like the presentation slides and sample code/applications. I can’t to checkout what other stuff is on the disk, but it was great.

Unfortunately, I’m dead tired after sitting in the same seat for ten hours, riding MAX for two, and being cold whenever I’m outside. Lloyd Center Cinemas couldn’t figure out how to turn the air conditioning off either, but that was the only down side to this.

I must say that I’ve never been in a room with so many men before. There were about ten women total and five were there because some boyfriend/husband dragged them along, and you could tell by their expressions.

Although Microsoft considers this marketing, it is an excellent way to get free demonstrations / tutorials of software that you’ll also get for free.