So this morning I finally got around to listening to the Microsoft Developer Road Trip CD, a 45 minute audio introduction to the new Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005.

The idea is that you take either the CD, or put the tracks onto a portable media player (this being Microsoft they won’t load straight onto an iPod) and listen on your commute to or from work – which is exactly what I did.

The CD consists of five question and answer sessions between various techies at Microsoft, although in between that you get Justin Lee Collins doing presenting infill.

Now it may be that I’m not the greatest fan of the guy, but I really thought that the infill was a bit of a waste of time, although to some extent I expect somebody thought it would liven up a dry subject. Anyway, the technical content was pretty good, although it was pitched at a pretty basic level. Interestingly the phrase “if I was a VB kind of guy” came up as an example in a couple of questions, with C# not mentioned much at all, so I suspect it may be an attempt to get the hardcore of VB6 developers to finally upgrade.

Perhaps the most interesting bits from my point of view were the SQL Server 2005 and Team System chats, as these were the bits I knew least about. The others I found covered stuff I already knew.

So was it worth it? The download was free, and to some extent my daily commute is dead time anyway, so it was pretty useful. In fact it has left me pondering whether to put some podcasts onto CD and listen to them on the way to work too…