PDC will be coming back to Southern California!

I hope to see you there!

Details: http://msdn.microsoft.com/events/pdc/

As part of Microsoft focusing in a whole new way on design we have a new site dedicated to design at www.microsoft.com/design. If you click around there you will find some interesting information on how much Microsoft is now thinking of design internally and externally.

My favorite is the mission statement "To create products that people love to experience". As a developer that is what I have always tried to but the interface the user sees is how they perceive the application. No matter how much work I did with making my code great, to the point of the better my code is the less the user thinks about it, but the way the application looks that is where the user will get the first impression and will make the biggest impact day to day.

This is an exciting time to be at Microsoft, I do think as we make more developers, CxOs and users understand how much design dose matter we can make peoples interaction with computers have a lot less friction!

Stay tuned for much more...

Do you know what a wiki is? They are great sites where anyone can contribute content to a site wikipeda is the biggest example of a wiki. Well someone at MS Corp decided to get on the bandwagon if you scroll down on some (for now) pages you will find the "Community Content" section there you will see any content that has been added and a link for you to add additional content.

Mark D’Urso who is the Dev Lead for MSDN Wiki project has more information about this on his blog.

I can wait to see what get posted!

OK this blog is mostly about boring tech stuff but I am working late and a friend IMed me a link for a video from a show call "Balls of Steel" from the UK. All I can say is wow I want this show here!

The December CTP of “WPF/E” is available.

At Mix last year the people who were there got to see and hear about “WPF/E” before that it talked about at the Microsoft's Professional Developer's Conference (PDC) in late 2005 but the project went dark until now!

No longer are we bound by crappy HTML for user experience! You want to check this out!

MSDN: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/asp.net/bb187358.aspx

Channel9: http://channel9.msdn.com/playground/wpfe/

SDK Download: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=2B01EC7E-C3B8-47CC-B12A-67C30191C3AA&displaylang=en

You want this... all I will say!

http://wls.live.com/

I was in the LA office today waiting for a meeting to start and had 1/2 an hour to kill so I started to do some of the internal trailing that I always seem behind on. In this training there was a lot of use of the term "malwhare" a often over used word so I asked Steve Lange (Dev TS for SoCal) "what is malwhare" he quite quickly fired back "it's malicious software... but I wonder what the term for harmless but useless software is? ... must be benware as it would be benign software!". So I now declare that all software that is useless to most must be referred to as benware! Software like the game Solitaire in Windows now be called benware! Have fun making your own list of software that falls in to this category.

Bye the way malware from wikipedia.org is an interesting read. for some reason there is no entry for benware. ;)

After many delays I finally have the socalcodecamp.com web site up and running!

This is a total redo of the original site, we had been hosting the site using dotNet Nuke but there was quite a lot of pain around that so we have moved to a pure ASP.NET 2.0 code base. I started with the Club Web Site Starter Kit from www.asp.net and started from there.

I have also included the AJAX tool kit in the site but have yet to implement any features using it but I hope to have some cool stuff in there soon.

If you go watch the video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-SZzAT-S5DQ (don't complain to me about it I did not make it) you will find a url at the end there you will find an offer to get a copy of Vista Business or Office Professional 2007 for free. You will need a passport account and you can't show that you work for a Microsoft partner or if you have a MSDN licence (snip from the web site You are not eligible to receive these offers if you or your employer is a participant in the Microsoft Partner Program or the Microsoft Developer Network).

Have fun and get it while the getting is good.

The Southern California launch events for VSTS for Database Professionals is coming...

December 6th in San Diego (register here) and December 7th in Los Angeles (register here) they are both in the local Microsoft offices. The agenda looks great for anyone who wants to lean more about this product.

Please let me know if you are going to come to either event so I can have an excuse to come ;)

A good friend of mine (David McCarter) is going to be teaching a class on the ASP.NET AJAX control toolkit at UCSD. I am looking forward to this class as I am sure it will be digging deep in to AJAX. For more information check out the course class information.

Let me know if you are going to attend.