Early this month I've read Scott Hanselman's invitation to Visual Studio 2008 InstallFest in Portland. If found the idea to get lots of people to install Visual Studio together quite interesting. I started looking around and quickly learned that this is a huge event for all .NET user groups in United States. However it turned out these meetings are not being held anywhere in Europe. What a bummer!
But I liked the idea so much that I though we should organize this in our user group ourselves. We asked for help our friends at local Microsoft office and although we didn't get free VS licenses we got two boxes of other gifts. We also got support from two local .NET shops: JCommerce, and Making Waves.
The meeting was held on Wendsday, 19th December at the nice pub called Cafe Szafe. We started by distributing copies of the VS Install DVD to everyone who wanted to install. Later Bartek Pampuch (MVP) did a great live demo of new features found in Visual Studio 2008. But we also had a fun part with two contests: a turnament in "Dead or Alive 4" on XBox360 and in Powerball spinning. The two winners got a special prizes, but we got plenty of other gifts so nobody left with empty hands. We also did a raffle for one license of ASP.NET RadControl provided by our friends at Telerik.
Overall 40 people showed at the meeting, and 33 of them got their laptops ready for installing VS. Among them we counted at least 25 successful installations.
You can find more photos here and here.
Thanks to everyone who helped me organize this. We got a lot of positive feedback from our group members so I think we should organize more of such events in future. We already have few ideas.