Yesterday I attended the Visual Studio 2013 launch event with several co-workers outside of Chicago. It seemed like a smaller venue and my expectations were pretty low. The non-technical talks were pretty awful. So much fluff and nothing meaningful. The more technical demos of TFS 2013 and Release Manager were better. They answered several of my questions. It feels like with the introduction of Azure and "Services" Microsoft is diluting the value of the MSDN subscription quite a bit. While I am no where near a Microsoft fan boy, I was excited to get an MSDN subscription. Now though, it's feeling like my company is paying a lot of money for me to not have access to the cutting edge stuff anymore. Visual Studio in the cloud...subscription. Xamarin partnership...discounted price. App insights...cloud only(we get some monthly Azure credits with MSDN). Release Manager...pay by the agent (this probably falls more in line with other licensing but I feel like a solid continuous delivery solution is missing from the Microsoft stack right now). Overall, it seems like they haven't quite figured out how to balance the Azure/Services story with the legacy MSDN access story. It would have been awesome to see more of that directly merging. Maybe I'm expecting too much from my 'Ultimate' subscription. More of a merge of services and MSDN might also make the EC2 vs Azure decision easier.

I tried my hand at sketchnoting a talk. Due to the lower quality of the of the talks, my sketchnotes got a little snarky. It was still fun to try though.

Keynote

Accelerating Business Agility

Introducing Release Management For TFS 2013