The launch event was held at the Sydney Harbour Convention Centre a couple of days ago, and IMHO I think it went pretty well. Some of the sponsors advert-presentations were a bit of a yawn, but what was interesting and a sign of the times was a demo application of an RSS reader (though the presenter said it was a blog, it had no posting capabilities which made it more of an aggregator).

I also sat on the MC++ session where one of the main items were the 98.11% compliance with the C++ standard. Templates (and partial templates) were also discussed, being a non-c++ user most of this flew of my head but it did look. There was a shot at C# with the give away of a couple of "My Compiler compiled yours" t's as well :)

Finally, the goodies bag came with a 180-day evaluation edition of Windows 2K3 Enterprise Edition, that's a whopping 6 months! Great stuff, especially for those of us who don't have MSDN subscriptions. Also in the bag was a 60-day evaluation edition of VS.NET 2K3. Nice!