Happy Holidays! Here’s your copy of Visual Studio 2008
With the recent release of Visual Studio 2008 so close to the holidays, we decided to make this holiday season a little extra special for the developers out there. In December, the Microsoft evangelism team, in conjunction with some of the local user group communities, will be hosting a number of holiday parties across the U.S. There will be games, food, prizes, networking and an opportunity to lay your hands on a fully licensed copy of Visual Studio 2008 Professional! Here’s the deal…
Come to a local holiday party in your neck of the woods, bring your laptop/desktop and install a 90-day trial copy of Visual Studio 2008 Professional. Once complete, you will receive a free (hot off the presses) VS2008 T-Shirt and a fully licensed copy of VS2008 Professional mailed to you once it becomes “market” available (after manufacturing). Yes, you’ll be installing a trial copy, but it’s a “special” trial copy. See…we won’t have fully packaged product available for you before the holidays. For that reason, we’re creating a special batch of trial discs to hand out for these events. Once you receive your fully packaged product in the mail, you’ll also receive a key to unlock your trial copy. This prevents you from having to uninstall and re-install. NOTE: The trial available from MSDN will NOT be unlockable. You will be required to uninstall this trial when installing your fully packaged product.
This is all great news. But with the good, comes the not-so good. Due to the fact that we’re giving free product out, we had to limit the cities were we’re holding the party and we had to cap the registration for each event. For the Midwest, we will be having parties at the following locations:
Milwaukee, December 11thSOLD OUTChicago, December 12thSOLD OUT- Indianapolis, IN – December 13th
However, this isn’t your only opportunity to get your hands on a free copy of VS2008. In December, we’ll be holding a slimmed down install fest as part of our DevCares events. If you can’t make it to the community holiday party, check out a DevCares event near you. There will be limitations to those events as well, so be sure to register right away.
Don’t fret if you can’t latch onto these great opportunities. We’ll be having additional events around the broader product launch in February/March timeframe.
