I attended today one of the many Ready to Launch Events sponsored by Microsoft to drive awareness of the new Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 features.

Oh my. I've been to boring courses, but this was DRY. And SLOW. And useless. If you've kept up with the never ending saga of "soon to be released" news and articles regarding Visual Studio and SQL Server at all within the past year or so, this should be a (limited) review.

Here's my analogy:

PDC 2005 in LA = Fast and the Furious
Ready To Launch (Local) = Driving Miss Daisy

The good: For attending and filling out a very brief survey, I received a full copy of Visual Studio 2005 Standard edition and a single user license of SQL Server 2005. The better: they didn't care when I left 2 and a half hours into the four hour session.

Bad: The guy presenting barely knew the material -- if anything was outside of the script he seemed to fall apart. As a representative of Microsoft trying to sell this stuff to us ... I expect someone knowledgeable. It didn't seem like he'd really used some of the stuff he demo'ed to us.