Chad Z. Hower a.k.a. Kudzu's Blogspace

During my launch tour I often talked about the changes in the dataset for Visual Studio.NET 2005. Many of you who used the dataset in 2003 I’m sure found it useful, but many of you also found it to be lacking in certain areas. In 2005 we have addressed...

Finally I’ve made it to the last launch in my launch schedule. Today I am in Bahrain and while still very busy we were actually able to take in a movie last night after our preparations. Attendance in Bahrain is good and interest as in all the other...

I was able to arrive in Doha a day early and finally able to catch up on some sleep before catching up on e-mail for the last few weeks. In Qatar we had a very low turn out unfortunately, but the interest of those who did attend was very high. Amr presented...

The Malta launch went off without a hitch with several hundred attendees. In Malta the majority was with the IT Pros versus developers which is the first launch to have more IT Pros than developers. I think that this was due to how the event was publicized...

Unfortunately because of logistics, and even more because of the fact that all flights were cancelled out of Cairo I was not able to attend the launch in Istanbul as originally planned. After many hours and several trips to the airport over a 14 hour...

Cairo was the largest event by far with around 2,000 attendees. I enjoyed my time in Cairo and enjoyed everyone I met except the taxi drivers. I was told about the taxi drivers before I arrived in Cairo, but even with the over 50 countries I have travelled...

I was quite surprised when I landed in Oman. What a amazingly beautiful country! The only shame is that I did not have more time to spend on the beach or to go into the mountains. But I’ll be sure to find and excuse to visit again with more time...

In Karachi we had a full house too with around 750 attendees. Just as in Lahore, the excitement and noise level was very high and it was definitely a fun event. I am glad to see that in Pakistan we have not only professionals, but a very large student...

All the events to date have been very successful and interest in both VSTS 2005 and SQL Server 2005 have been high. However in Pakistan the interest has been exceptionally so. So many people showed up in Lahore that we had to turn away about 400 people...

My second launch in Saudi Arabia was at the Four Seasons in Riyadh. If you are not familiar with this building, check out this picture . It’s a very unique and famouse building. The event went very well and I hope to see many of you at the Gulf...

After a brief few days in Istanbul to obtain some visas, I’m back on the road for more launches. Today I presented two dev tracks at the launch in Khobar, Saudi Arabia. Official estimates are not in yet but I estimate that there were over 400 people...