Free is a good price.  If you're looking to increase your skills and value for work, training is always a good way to help you.  Microsoft is providing free virtual labs for you to learn their technologies.  If you work with .NET technologies and spend a lot of time with Visual Studio, then you owe it to yourself to go check out the virtual labs.  There's something for everyone.  The only investment you need to make is setting aside some time to go through the labs.

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Visual Studio 2008 Virtual Labs

Microsoft Visual Studio Team System Virtual Labs

Angela Benkowski and Paul Hacker gave us a lap around Visual Studio 2010.  The main emphasis seems to be test driven development.  There will be more design tools for Silverlight baked into VS2010.  They have enhanced the dynamically generated architecture diagrams.  That looked pretty cool.  I'm gonna need a bigger monitor though.  All the namespaces, classes and methods take up the whole screen.  We will be able to generate a sequence diagram from code.  For those of us who don't like to write lots and lots of documentation, this will be a handy feature for me to generate the documentation.

In addition, there will be testing of user interfaces called CodedUI Test.  It has a record feature that allows you to set up your UI tests and record the user actions.  Once you're finished recording a set of user actions, you will be able to generate code.  Once the code is generated, then you can go back and modify and/or add assert statements.

They will be introducting Dotfuscator Software Services.  Big brother is watching.  They are adding tracking features and allows developers to attempt to tamper proof their applications.  You will be able to instrument your applications to send data about how users are using your app.  The problem I have is privacy issues.

Dan Rigsby talked about Oslo.  Oslo is a way to write languages.  It allows DSLs to be created and they can be used to generate code and/or SQL.  I like Dan's speaking ability.  He gets excited and enthusiastic about his topics.  He had demo problems.  His VPC was really, really slow.  It's not completely his fault but he did say the usual excuse, "It worked for me last night..."  I definitely would go see Dan present again.  I believe that he will figure out the demo glitches and will make it only better.

Oslo is beyond bleeding edge technology.  It's more like hemoraging edge.  There are some interesting concepts that Microsoft is toying with.  I always take these ideas with a grain of salt.  I look at it as Microsoft presents a concept and see if it sticks in the dev community.

I'm sitting in the 1st Windows Azure presentation.  I still haven't had an "aha" moment.  The speaker (Wade Wegner) is a bit dry.  Doesn't sound real excited about the technology.  It seems like he's just reading a script.  I dont' feel like he's giving us something that we can get enthusiatic about.  On the flipside, he's a young guy and has gotten up in front of 200+ people.  That's not usually an easy task.  I'm going to want the slide deck so that I can go back through the presentation.  There seems to be a lot of info there.

Rob Jacobs did the keynote.  He did a nice job.  Nothing jaw-dropping or earth-shattering but he's certianly enthusiastic.  He talked a lot about Azure.  His main point was that we are already very comfortable about leveraging web hosting providers to host our web sites instead of having all our own hardware.  The idea is that eventually we will become comfortable leveraging massive server resources in the cloud.  My main interest will be if I can leverage the processing power to accomplish my tasks quicker than running on my own hardware.

I'm going down to the MSDN Developer Conference in Chicago on January 13th, 2009.  For those of us who didn't have the opportunity to go to Los Angeles to PDC '08, this is a great way to geek out in the Midwest.

Find out all the great info from there site : MSDN Developer Conference

Hope to see you there...