The Australian Ready Launch event reached my home town yesterday with the event being held in the Brisbane Convention and Exhibition Centre. The community launch event was well attended on Wednesday night with around 100 developers converging on the local Microsoft office for some refreshments and some good geek talk. I was asked quite a few questions on Visual Studio Team System and particularly the Team Foundation Server. It is great to see people out there getting stuck into this great new product, especially given the fact that TFS isn’t released until Q1 next year. My message for folks out there is “Don’t wait – start evaluating it now.”

The business launch event on Thursday saw Andrew, Chuck and myself once again going through the sessions in the developer track. It was good to see an audience of a couple of hundred developers turn up to see some great new features in Visual Studio 2005 Team System, SQL 2005 and Biztalk 2006. The sessions all seemed to go well with only a couple of minor glitches along the way. Based on the number of questions that people asked at the end of each session, there are quite a few people out there eagerly getting involved in the new releases which is great to see. I had to take off before Andrew and Chuck finished their final smart client session but I have already heard it went very well for them.

One final comment… I must say that seeing the effort that goes on behind the scenes putting these events together for the Australian developer community, I have the utmost respect for Frank and his DPE team. Being on the road for three weeks expending the level of energy they do is a tough gig. Now the Launch Events are drawing to a close, they only get a brief rest before they move onto planning for the next Security Submit. For what it’s worth, I hope you guys know you are well appreciated by everyone I talk to in the developer community