The 'Heroes Happen Here' launch was well worth my time.  Not only did we get a chance to see demos of Microsoft's newest products, I also got a chance to meet up with many of the most energetic developers in the midwest.  About 50 of us headed to Greektown after the event for an after-event event.  You can view my photos of the day here.

At the end of the day, everyone walked off with (among other things) a copy of Visual Studio 2008.  I was excited because I had spent most of the day following the Developers Track, which outlined the features of the new Visual Studio.  I'll be installing it this weekend. 

I especially like the fact that I can install VS 2008 and work on applications using older .Net frameworks.  Framework versions 2.0, 3.0 and 3.5 are all available.  This mitigates the risk of upgrading and it means I don't need to install multiple versions of Visual Studio.  I can write code that targest .Net Framework 2.0 but still take advantage of the improvements in the IDE, such as client-side debugging, stylesheet troubleshooting, and built-in Ajax support.

My customer has decided to upgrade to Visual Studio 2008 but defer the decision to upgrade the framework on which we have built our applications.

Here is a list of new features in Visual Studio 2008:  http://msdotnetsupport.blogspot.com/2007/11/22-new-features-of-visual-studio-2008.html