I'm hanging out at Microsoft Calgary at this point. I'm still recovering from the Calgary launch yesterday, which involved standing for several hours answering lots and lots of questions. Actually, the standing wasn't that bad. My favourite part though was the Q&A at the end of the day. I'd say that Calgary was probably our best stop on the tour for Q&A, with the caveat that I did not attend the Toronto Q&A (even though I was in the building). The Calgary folks provided us with a constant stream of high-quality questions, including a string of them on Windows OneCare, which we really were not able to answer.

The only bad thing is that my notebook hard-drive failed yesterday at the launch. I knew something was bad when the BSOD popped up on my XP machine. Gotta say that that never happens on XP, contrary to the belief of the Slashdot crowd. They'll likely need to put on their tin-foil hats to read/hear that. My buddy Marc -- whom I'm staying with in Calgary -- graciously leant me his PIII Thinkpad for the day. It is slower than my regular machines (particularly compared to my X64 machines with 4 times more RAM back at the office), but it sure works better than my cooked laptop.

Well, I'm at the end of my tour-of-duty on the VS 2005 Launch: Canadian Edition. I really enjoyed myself hanging out with the MS Canada folks, in Toronto, Ottawa, Vancouver and Calgary. In particular, there was a set of us that spent a lot of time in the experts area (while not presenting), answering and routing customer questions among each other. It was tough to beat the expertise held by the Count and the Saint. They could pretty much answer anything from Com+ to Windows Forms, with a whole lot in between. I noticed a bunch of interesting diagrams that the both of them constructed on the paper boards (cannot think of a better term). Can you say WCF? And Zed was our man when it came to VSTS, particularly licensing and the apparent mystery of VS SKUs. We were constantly calling him over, as there were *a lot* of questions relating to VSTS.

I also enjoyed "experting" with the bunch of the folks that joined us in one or more of the other cities. We had a lot of fun together, on and off the field.

That's all not to mention all of the developer/IT Pro folks that we met in each city. I had a lot of interesting conversations with our customers all over Canada. You are the ones that make our platform so successful. You are also the reason why I put so much effort into the CLR, back in Redmond. It sounds like a marketing-line, but it is true. We spend a lot of time in conference rooms, hallways and each other's offices (not to mention mail) talking about how customers are going to use our product. Invariably, we broaden what seems like a simple scenario into something a fair bit more significant, but that will delight and empower a much larger (hopefully all of them) set of customers. That's what it's all about.

Thanks again to everyone I met on the launch tour. I hope that you got as much out of the experience as I did.

I'm now back to Team CLR, back in rainy Redmond.