Fun in Philly

Wow, I had a lot more fun in Philly than I thought I would have.

Back up a bit.  I had originally registered for the Microsoft launch event in Philly as a participant a few weeks back.  Last week, Rich, my new manager, got 4 of us together, the only 4 that had really played around with SQL Server 2005, and asked if we could come up with a demo for the show as, apparently, we had a presence at the show. 

Long story short, I ended up taking up part of the responsibility of building the demo and also working the booth at the show.  Somehow, we ended up building a database mirroring demo which featured an ASP.Net 2.0 and Atlas frontend.

I also ended up with the responsibility of creating some posters and datasheets that we could hand out along with our demo.  Keep in mind that all of this came up last Thursday.  Having technical and graphical skills is both a curse and a blessing I guess.

Well, in any case, the show was a huge success.  We had people lining up to look at the demo and to talk to Igor and myself.  For an app that was put together in 10-12 hours, it was surprisingly stable.  We only had one major issue and that was a networking issue (dropped IP addresses).  It was so good that we had people coming back to the booth after seeing the datasheet from other people.  We had people coming back with their friends because they were so impressed.  It was quite amazing.  We ran out of the datasheets for the demo in the first 90 minutes of the show (maybe the first 60).  Fortunately, we also had it in poster form (which we didn’t give away).  It drew quite a bit of attention and there were a lot of people who just stopped in their tracks to check it out.  The funny story regarding that is I almost didn’t have the poster printed.  I was originally only going to print 8.5×11 copies, but Frank, another consultant, suggested that I go with the poster.

Believe it or not, I put it together in ~3-4 hours Tuesday night after I got back from a client site.  Everything on this sheet was created from scratch (Except for the computer graphic, which came from Visio).  I swear I was half asleep when I put it all together 😀

I actually heard a lot of comments on the poster, even one from a professor who said she really loved the layout and colors.  Even my wife was impressed that I put this together when I did/in the amount of time that I did it in.

So all in all, a fun but tiring day.  Man, I just love building cool stuff and I love connecting with other developers.  Hopefully, I’ll have more opportunities like this in the future.