Ok, thanks to a tonne of work its taken me a while to get around to writing this entry.
On the 23rd November we held our Express Launch Party at Uni. Myself and Andy arrived nice and early, dropped the prizes off in Rob's office and headed down to the lab that we'd booked to hold the event in.

 When we got there we started setting up, Andy set up his laptop and got our server running, then we moved on to the lab PCs. Mark Bell and the Systems team had been really good to us and had set up Virtual PC on the machines with an image we had provided containing a C# Express installation. As far as i know this is he first time the department has used Virtual PC in the lab environment. Unfortunately when we came to start the image, it was read-only, changing this settting had no effect as we did not have the rights to make the change. A quick visit to the systems team later and they brilliantly popped down to the lab and set about fixing the problem.We'd been prepared for a few problems and had four hours left before the start. Time went by, we set up more stuff, the projector, the slides, we even rewrote some of our 'getting started guide'.
About an hour before kick off people started arriving, we were doing it in the Games Masters Lab so the first people were mostly Masters students who either sat watching us dash around or carried on with some of their coursework. Finally at 13:55 we had finished all the preparation and most people had arrived, eager to start the coding. By 14:05 we had between 35-40 entrants and 4 lecturers all ready to start. Andy kicked off with a presentation and then a quick introduction to what coding needed doing. Simply put, entrants had to fill in a method in a dll which would perform an evaluation of a game board and return an int with a value representing the potential of winning by capturing a given square. They then had to upload the dll to the server where it would be entered in numerous games with all of the other entrants. Players could then watch their entry fight it out, make modifications to their code and then upload their new entry, replacing the old one.
As people started coding we came across a few problems but nothing that wasn't ironed out within a few minutes. Everyone got going, some individually, some as a team, even the lecturers were huddled at the side discussing possible strategies. The whole thing was going really smoothly.
Throughtout  the event a few pizzas arrived and everyone got to have a few breaks to eat and drink. Towards the end we kicked off the "Challenge Rob" portion of the competition, students who thought their implementation was good were able to challenge Rob Miles', it was a great laugh people gathered around to watch as Rob's AI walked all over nearly all of the challengers.
At 16:00 we called an end to programming and everyone had to upload their attempts. The tournament board was cleared and then the entries were set off playing against each other, everyone was gathered around the screen as over a ten minute period their attempts faught to win them a prize.
In the end a Masters student, David Waby, walked away with the top prize of Office 2003 Pro it was a real close thing though as his code and the second place entrants were virtually the same. There were a few other small prizes up for grabs, for the person who came last, a genuine Rob Miles purchased printer cartridge, one that he himself had bought but couldn't remember what printer he'd bought it for. This went to a guy who simply put a while true in his dll. Of course as each game had a time limit his entry simply sat there and timed out, that guy is now the proud owner of the mystery cartridge.
At the end of the event everyone said that they had had a great time, they even said theyd come back and do it all again. As people were starting to leave it meant there was only two things left for me to do. Hand out Imagine Cup leaflets and tidy the lab up.
An hour later we left, tired but more than happy, we'd had a great day as had everyone at the event, it had been a bigger success than we had ever imagined. One thing I will definitely take away from this is a respect for those who organise events on a regular basis, I take my hat off to those people they are indeed people to be admired.