Developer launch of Vista and Office in the UK – Register now

As I’ve hinted previously, we’re planning a developer launch event in the UK for 19th and 20th January 2007. I’m now able to provide some additional details including the registration link: http://www.microsoft.com/uk/launch2007/dev/default.mspx

There are a few things worth bearing in mind about this event:

· We’re really pushing hard to make it work online as well as a physical event. To this end, we’re broadcasting the keynote live and are prerecording all of the technical sessions and putting the recordings up on the site at the same time they’re delivered here. The recordings are being made to give you the impression you’re in the audience watching, so you should get a really good experience even if you can’t make the physical event

  • We’re including a number of real customers on stage with us (and of course, these will be in the pre-recordings online as well). These are developers from customers who have built solutions using the technology we’re talking about, so that they can share some of those experiences with you and help illuminate the technical content you’ll be receiving
  • The keynote will be delivered by none other than Sanjay Parthasarathy. He’s the most senior Developer & Platform person at Microsoft, based in Redmond (and my ultimate boss, so my neck’s on the line if this all goes wrong). He’s incredibly well placed to position these products to developers and provide the top-level view of what we’re trying to do
  • Ah and you may have noticed that 20th January 2007 is a Saturday. What’s that all about? Well, we’re really keen to allow you to get your hands on these products as developers. So we’re building a huge room full of machines and inviting you to come along and write some code with us. We’ll brief you on an assignment then give you help to write the code in a two hour period, making sure that you get real experience of the platforms. And we’ll have some fun too, seeing as it’s a Saturday.

There’s plenty more to talk about but hopefully that gives you a flavour. This will be a significant launch event for us and if you have even a passing interest in this technology and attend just one event this year – it’s the one to go for. We’re pulling out the stops for this one.

 

UPDATE: People have asked me about registering for the online event, as the link posted above is only for the "physical" event. You don't need to pre-register for the online event, just visit that same link on 19th January and you'll be directed to the sessions etc. We will ask you to enter some info about yourself when you do this, but nothing too onerous.