Unusually we met on a Tuesday this month (usually we meet on the first Wednesday of the month) to accomodate Yuri and we also had a new venu, The Crystal Ballroom at the Taj Samudra, to accomodate the expected numbers Yuri would attract. We usually get around 50 people turning up but this month Yuri proved his pulling power by attracting a crowd of around 200 I would have thought. Two large screens were erected at the front of the room to enable everyone to see Yuri's demonstrations and slides.
First Yuri started out with a introductory talk about the forthcoming technologies Microsoft were due to release along with his best guess release dates.
| Visual Studio 2005 | Oct 2005 |
| Longhorn Client Including Indigo & Avalon | 2006 |
| Longhorn Server & Client With WinFS | 2007 |
Yuri then spoke at length about Visual Studio Team System. His talk was accompanied by slides although there was no actual demo of the product. However this was probably a wise move as I for one had not even seen the features of VSTS before and was struggling to take it all in. At the end Yuri took some questions.
There was a break of 15-20 minutes where refreshments were provided.
After the break Yuri moved onto talking about Longhorn. This included a demonstration of the product. I found this very interesting as this was the first chance I had had to see Longhorn.
At around 20:15 Yuri suggested we spend the last 20-30 minutes in a question and answer session where 3 prizes were awarded for the best questions. This covered large number of different subjects and Yuri was honest enough to admit when he didn't know the answer but was still prepared to guess.
I've probably missed out quite a lot of what Yuri talked about but this post should give you the gist. Yuri was an excellent speaker who's enthusiasm for Microsoft's products was evident. I found it slightly amusing to hear Yuri speaking in his heavily accented (Eastern European) English whilst questions were coming from the floor in heavily accented (Sri Lankan) English. However Yuri's grasp of the local accent was excellent and certainly a lot better than mine despite the fact I've been working over here for 9 months. I think a big thankyou should go out to all those responsible for organising this event and for Mircosoft for bring Yuri over to Sri Lanka and sponsoring the event.