The READY Launch Event

The event went off very well. All the attendees were given vouchers for a complimentary copy of the VS2005 professional edition.I attended 4 Chalk & Talk sessions (previously called Deep Dive)

1. Office Development, Windows Forms and ClickOnce Deployment : Its A Smart Client

2. .NET, SQL and BTS : Application Design Considerations

3. Protect What You Love : Writing Secure Code

4. Visual Studio Team System - Get A Lifecycle

All of them allowed focused on questions put forward by the attendees to the experts.

Also visited the Coding4Fun stand hosted by John Allwright, (John is the Product Manager for Visual Studio here in the UK) and saw the Lego RCX in action.There is going to be an update on the Coding4Fun website regarding the same with the code soon.

It was a great day and there was a lot to learn from the sessions

VS 2005 Arriveth

VS 2005 has officially been released on Monday the 7th of November 2005. Contrary to Microsoft's previous statement that it would cost $49 it is now being offered free for one year.After the first year developers would still have a fully functional version with the same license that was granted when it was registered.The express editions can be downloaded from the MSDN web site. Microsoft has also included a lot of freebies with the Express editions and is also allowing the Express editions to be used for Commercial applications.