I went to a big Microsoft event (St. Louis) yesterday with my girlfriend (how many girlfriends are willing to go to such nerd events?) - it was to celebrate the launch of Visual Studio 2005.
The guy talked for 4 hours, with two breaks in the middle. We were there 2 hours in advance to register and stand in line. I had pre-registered and had a ticket already, but my girlfriend didn't (due to some mix up, she had a ticket for the SQL Server even). They had a raffle for a DVD player w/ built in screen, an iPod, some MSDN books, and a $50 gift certificate to an online Ticket retailer. We didn't win any of that. We did, however, get free copies of some software.
They gave us each a free copy of the full version of Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Standard ($299 retail), SQL Server 2005, and BizTalk Server 2006. I also got a bonus DVD with some extra software (like IE 7 Beta 1) and sample code for pre-registering.
I already have a little experience with Visual Basic 2005 Express, but now I can play around with the more "full" version of the product. I already have legit copies of Visual Basic 5, 6, and .NET 2003.
During the event, a presentation was given showing some of the new features of Visual Studio 2005, including some great advances in the ASP.NET web developer program, and some insight into their "no-code" ideas of programming (supposedly, you can reduce your code by up to 70% when you write programs with VS2005 and the .NET 2.0 Framwork).
The event was rather boring - a lot of people fell asleep during it (including me and my girlfriend!), and some people even left before it was over. They obviously didn't care enough about the subject material or the fact they were going to get free software to stay the entire time!
Even though there were a lot of parts that really dragged on, it still had sparked enough interest in my girlfriend that she decided to keep her copy of the software to "try it out."