At the end of last summer while lying by the pool I received a call from a client talking about a virtual launch that they were thinking about doing. They were in Seattle and I was on holiday in Spain and I didn't really think too much about it until a few weeks later when I got back to the office.
Once back and after a number of detail conversations we started down the route of building the Virtual Launch Experience (VLE) for the joint launch of Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008 and Visual Studio 2008.
The VLE is a rich internet application, designed and built with Visual Studio 2008 and Expression Studio, hosted on Windows Server 2008 accessing SQL Server 2008, and presented in Microsoft Silverlight.
The VLE has all of the excitement and elements of the live event and some extra virtual functionality including:
Live streaming keynote address by Steve Ballmer (9AM PST)
An interactive 3D event guide
Microsoft product and sponsor booths, rich with videos, presentations, brochures, and special offers
Community exhibitors that allow you to connect with the companies and groups
Breakout sessions for deep diving into the 2008 Launch Wave technologies
A virtual backpack to store and download exhibitor content
A unified event interface to effortlessly navigate your virtual experience
This has been a great project to work on and I'm lucky enough to have a really dedicated team to deliver it. What I love is that they've been able to do all of this in five products that haven't even launched yet.
If you want to check it out you can view it at www.microsoft.com/virtualevents.
Tags: Silverlight, Virtual Launch Experience, Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008, Expressions Suite