The Silicon Valley Code Camp 2006 was executed very well. I arrived early at 8am, since I had signed up for the Vista Install Fair slot at 9am. I had hoped to get Vista installed on my laptop (Dell Inspiron E1505) in time to attend the Windows Communication Foundation seminar at 9:45am. No such luck, as I was in the Microsoft room from 8:45am until 1pm. Microsoft gave everyone who attended the event a disk with the VUA (Vista Upgrade Advisor) and a sheet of instructions. Included on the disk were diagnostic tools that recorded data about our computers, so the Microsoft engineers could run diagnostics on the later. My computer had two problems: one, the VUA failed to execute successfully, and two, the Vista Upgrade failed with a blue screen dump. And it failed so miserably that we couldn't even perform the rollback to Windows XP.
The clean install of Vista worked perfectly (and I am using the computer right now). I installed Visual Studio 2005 and Office 2007--they both performed well in this environment. It just confirmed for me what I already firmly believed, namely that it's better to freshly install Vista than doing the upgrade. I saw a number of people having problems due to the Upgrade process. Nevertheless, I am happy to help out Microsoft in exchange for a free product key!
Despite missing out on 2 seminars, I enjoyed hanging out in the room with the Microsoft engineers. They answered a number of questions and were very patient looking at everyone's computer. They demoed a number of new Vista features, including ReadyBoost, where you get a performance boost from a USB 2.0 flash drive. I had just bought one at CompUSA, but I was disappointed when Vista reported that it didn't perform well enough for ReadyBoost. I wish I had read this excellent article over at ExtremeTech where they test 9 USB 2.0 Flash drives and see if they can be used by ReadyBoost.
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