You did not see this here but you need to tune in to Scott Guthrie's blog at about 9am (Pacific Time) today to see some darn big news!

This may seam strange for a resource for developers but I think it's quite important for developers to understand the OS. The Windows marketing team has a lot of resources for this month about Windows Server 2008 and IIS 7 check it out!

Windows Server Division WebLog : October Marketing Waves

OK this may and only may be going a bit too far but I love it!

The best thing you'll see today: John P. Harvard goes Halo - Joystiq

Last night I got to be the local lead for the Halo 3 launch event in the SoCal Irvine office and WOW what I hot event! OK that was a reference to the non-existent air conditioning but event with no air conditioning every one had a blast. We had 6 XBoxes running Halo 3 and one running Garter Hero. 130 people from all parts of SoCal (San Diego, Santa Monica and further) lots of good gammier food (pizza, chips, candy etc.). At one point we had one team of 4 get ganged up on by two other teams because they were just too good :).

I have posted some pictures on flickr with the tag "halo3irvine" check them out and please add your own if you have some.

I would like to point out this event was a huge effort and all I had to do was setup the local hardware and host the event. Many many people (Erin, Jason, Yesenia, Scott, Matt, Jas, Shaina and Chris) made this event happen you all are the reason that working here is so much fun!

Anyone up for a geek diner in Honolulu? I happen to be going to Honolulu to give a talk on Windows Mobile development to the Hawaii Telecommunications Association conference. The local .NET users group will not be meeting while I am there so we are getting together for a geek dinner on October 10th at 6pm at Compadres Bar & Grill if you can go please go to upcoming and let us know you are coming. There are only 40 seats available.. It's simple, RSVP yes, show up, eat, drink, pay for your stuff, meet awesome people, have great conversations and a great time!

I hope to see all the local geeks there!

While at a resent team offsite Anand Iyer said it was legal to make a left on red at a one-way and while I took my drivers education along time ago and in a different state I thought for sure there had been a big stick about this... Alas I was wrong and Anand found the answer on the DMZ site Laws and Rules of the Road - TURNS.

An updated list of user groups. While I don't think there will ever be a holistic list of user groups in Southern California as this is a moving target I hope to post a list like this about once a quarter or so. This is a list of Microsoft Developer focused user groups that I know if.

I hope all of the groups on this list are registered on codezone.com so that can be more of a central place to get a holistic list. By the way the nice thing about codezone.com is that there are some (but there needs to be more) non-MS focused groups listed there as well.

If you know of any other groups in SoCal please let me know.

Central California .Net User Group  http://www.centralcaldotnet.com/
San Luis Obispo .NET User Group http://www.slodotnet.org/
Community TJ.NET    http://www.tjnet.org
Hawaii Dot Net Users Group  http://www.hawaiidotnet.org/
Inland Empire .NET User's Group http://www.iedotnetug.org/
LA C# Developers Group  http://www.lacsharp.org/
Los Angeles .NET Developers Group   http://www.ladotnet.org/
Los Angeles SQL Server Professionals Group  http://www.sql.la/
Orange County .NET User Group   http://www.ocdotnet.org
Orange County C# Developers Group   http://www.occsharp.org/
San Diego .NET Developers Group http://sddotnetdg.org/
San Diego .NET User Group   http://www.sandiegodotnet.com/
San Diego SQL Server Users Group    http://sdsqlug.org/
San Gabriel Valley .NET Developers Group    http://www.sgvdotnet.org/
Santa Barbara .NET Developer Group  http://www.sbdotnetug.org
SoCal DotNetNuke Users Group    http://www.socaldug.org/
South Bay .NET User Group   http://southbaynet.org/
Southern California .Net Architecture Users Group   http://www.SoCalDotNetArchitecture.org
Southern California .Net Developer's Group  http://www.socaldotnet.org/
LA Fox  http://www.lafox.org
Orange County FoxPro Developers Group   http://www.ocfox.org/
The FoxPro Developers Network of San Diego  http://www.foxdevsd.org/

OK I work for Microsoft but I don't work at Microsoft because it's a great place to work... Wait what did he just say? That is correct I don't work for Microsoft because it's a great place to work... It is a great place to work but like any place there are frustrations and issues but what keeps me going is one simple reason! The value proposition of the software Microsoft makes. The problem we (Microsoft) as a company has is that we use way too many ways to try to describe this but finally we have a resource that lays this out for developers quite well.

Check out the Why learn about .NET you will find some of the arguments about why developers should consider .NET for their next project and it lays out some good resources for them get started with.

We just now need more resources that talk about how and why rest of out products save time and money. For a start you can go to the Compare site on Microsoft.com.