The Microsoft Student Community at NTNU arranged an event at the Gløshaugen campous today. Close to 60 students showed up for what turned out to me a really fun, interesting and inspiring event.

My long time friend, colleague and partner in crime Gøran Hansen had invited Lars Bjørnar Listhaug from Abeo to come and talk about their experiences from rebuilding the Lindbak Retail system from the ground up. The project was an early adopter of .NET 2.0 and SQL 2005, and was one of the case studies for the VS2005 launch. The application must be best looking Windows Forms application I've ever seen. Imagine the coolest WPF stuff you've seen, but implemented in Windows Forms (no WPF at the time they started building the application).

The second presentation was by Gøran Hansen, who was a one-man coding army today! In about 45 minutes he went all over Vista showing off cool developer centric features. Some of the things he demoed (with live code) was connecting to the Vista Desktop Search Index using OleDB, the Windows RSS platform, Vista Sidebar Gadgets (including my Free SMS gadget) and some WPF samples. I think many of the students left with a really good impression of what Vista has to offer "under the hood". Great job by Gøran!

Between the sessions Abeo sponsored Pizza for hungry students, and it looked like people where really having a good time!

Gøran is doing his Vista show (really, it's not just a presentation) again at the Norwegian .NET User Group May 8th. If you have a chance you should really come to see some cool sides of Windows Vista!