The local launch for Windows Vista Office 2007 & Exchange 2007 is coming to Southern California late January. There will be a total of 4 events in SoCal and one in Hawaii (that I will just have to go help with :)) I hope to see all of the users groups show up and help promote themselves.

For an overview of the events go to the launch site.

Each sits signup are:

• Ready for a New Day: Launch Tour 2007- Los Angeles Convention Center, January 26, 2007 Register
• Microsoft Across America Launch Event - Ontario California, February 20, 2007 Register
• Microsoft Across America Launch Event - San Diego Convention Center, February 22, 2007 Register
• Microsoft Across America Launch Event - Anaheim Convention Center, Tuesday, February 27 Register
• Microsoft Across America Launch Event - Hawaii Convention Center, March 01, 2007 Register

The Microsoft Across America Launch Events are done by the great group of Microsoft Across America presenters like Anand Iyer & Rob Bagby. The Ready for a New Day: Launch Tour 2007 will have many other (including myself) Microsoft people and Tim Huckaby and Michele Leroux Bustamante doing the presentations.

I hope you all can make as many of the events as you can, I am sure you will get all kinds of interesting information from them all.

This is a cool tidbit that I just found on Jason Langridge's blog... It looks like the Best Buy Geek Squad is using Windows Mobile to provide better service. The full press pass article is here, what I like from it is the quote “It provides our field personnel with rapid and constant access to comprehensive real-time customer information, an obvious competitive advantage over businesses that don’t.” this has been the pompous of Windows Mobile but until now the applications, carriers and devices have been a bit lacking but I think we are at a tipping point for Windows Mobile...

http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/VS2005SP1

Go get it! Lots of fixes and make VS 2005 work well on Vista (still not 100% but close).

I had a great lunch today with a bunch of people who I work with around user groups and developer events in SoCal. While we were doing some good SoCal conversation I was turned on to this funny web site.

Thanks Stephen!

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. ;)