Before I even write this I know I’m going to sound ungrateful, whingeing, grasping, greedy and all sorts of other things, but here goes…
There was a SQL2005 launch event in London yesterday, and one of my colleagues from another team went along. He sent the link to register to the event to me and some others on my team, but we had a look at the agenda and we realised that we’d seen pretty much all of the material before so we didn’t go. I started working with AS2005 in the Spring of last year, and when I joined my current team my colleagues had already been working with AS2005 for more than a year before; as a result we know quite a lot about AS2005 and as beta testers we found a lot of bugs. Anyway, I just spoke to the guy who went to the launch event this morning and he told me that he got a FREE copy of SQL2005 Standard Edition and a FREE copy of Visual Studio Professional just for turning up. And I admit that I was jealous. Yes I got a fleece when I went to my first Yukon airlift back in 2002(?), yes I got a Yukon t-shirt and picture frame last year, and yes I got a *lot* of inside knowledge, help and support as a beta tester which has been invaluable professionally and which I’m very, very grateful for, but copies of SQL2005 and VS are really quite tasty gifts. You’d think that Microsoft would at least treat beta testers as well as the people that go to launch events by giving them a free copy of the product they’ve been testing, wouldn’t you?
I got a good chuckle from reading this post. Not to throw cold water on you, but it was well publicized that Microsoft would be giving away SQL Server 2005 and Visual Studio 2005 at the launch events. The didn\’t say this directly, but one could\’ve easily inferred this from the sign-up page.
Fair enough, it\’ll teach me to read the small print better in future…