Well, maybe it wasn't the event of the season but things went fairly well. The presenter (yours truly) managed to get through 3 out of the 5 demos. The final demo still did not work. I can't seem to figure out what is going wrong there. If you are working on this demo, you will know that there is a trigger that is created which fires and calls a CLR stored proc. That trigger doesn't get called when I do the demo. I've done it from scratch 3 times and apparently must be making the same mistake 3 times.
I have some suggestions for those speakers working through the Design and Development demo for their respecive launch events. Make sure that you have walked through all demos and have been able to present them in under 2 hours. That sounds obvious, but it is much tougher to do with this demo than it may appear. When I was sitting in the LiveMeeting sessions preparing for this demo, I notices that many of the soon to be presenters have not used the tools they were preparing for in this demo. This is not a bad thing, it just means that you need to prepare a little bit harder. My point is with this demo, make sure that you watch the LiveMeeting at least one more time.
I gave a rough demo my friends at ARC of the Design and Development presentation for the launch events. The designers make a lot more sense when you actually get your hands on them. It was cool to see the App tied to the infrastructure, validate deployments and then generate a deployment document. I will say however that most of the folks in our Op's department wouldn't make heads or tails of that document. I realize it's just an stylesheet and can be “summarized”. Has anyone out there actually done that yet?
If you are in the area next Tuesday, check out the caparea.net users group launch event. Hopefully I have this demo down by then!