Today is Microsoft’s Launch 2010 event in Dallas. This is only my second tech conference, but the first “real” one—the other was the ChurchTechCamp “unconference”—so I was pretty excited to see what happens at these.

My team came to the 2008 launch before I started, and they got a bunch of schwag: Full versions of Vista, Server 2008, SQLServer, and VisualStudio. And that’s why we came this time. We’re in the middle of a major design process with a pretty short span before our planned launch, so we don’t have a lot of free time. Unfortunately, we’re not getting what we came for. “The days of free software are gone,” according to the announcement just made by the Development emcee. Crap.

So now I’m just sitting here learning about some new features that I can’t use because I won’t have a copy of the software. So I’m thumbing my nose at MS by using Linux Mint to get some work done while I’m here.

On the upside, there’s free Starbucks coffee and tea, and some pretty good sandwiches for lunch (and Grandma’s Cookies), so it’s not a total loss.

If you are a SharePoint or .NET developer, there’s some really cool stuff happening in SharePoint and VisualStudio 2010, so grab a trial and check it out.