I attended the HEROES Happen {here} event in Washington DC yesterday. It was the global launch of Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008 and Visual Studio 2008. This was my first event like this I have attended. It was awesome. I am definitely going to go to more of these. They are so cool.

Microsoft fed us for free and gave us a little lunch cooler that contained our breakfast and lunch. We also received $300 worth of software. Microsoft's Senior VP did the keynote presentation which was very informative. After that there was four presentations I attended. The first was an introduction to Windows Server 2008. The second covered virtualization. Mainly they discussed Hyper-V which is some pretty cool stuff and is going to be a great addition to the operating system. Next was security. There is some awesome security features built in to Server 2008. Network Access Protection (NAP) being the big one. NAP coupled with ipsec is going to be very difficult to hack. The last one was on IIS. I wasn't interested in that one so I ventured over to the hands on lab. That was pretty cool. They had about 12 labs you could go through. I did a few of them and learned a great deal.

On top of all this there were vendors galore peddling their software and hardware. They had giveaways, mostly X-Box's and Zune's. I didn't win any but registered for just about everything. Most of the booths were giving away free gifts like pens and flashlights. But most importantly is the upcoming technology being associated with Server 2008, SQL 2008 and Visual Studio 2008. There is some really incredible initiatives coming and I am excited about the future of IT in the Windows world.

If you have never been to one of these events I strongly urge you to attend. Not only do you get free stuff, you get to interact with a lot of like-minded people and learn a ton of information that could benefit you and your company. It was definitely worth the time and am looking forward to more of these.