If you have not figured it out I live the MSDN Virtual Labs, they are a quick easy way to lean about stuff with little impact to your system. A few new labs were recently released, use them in good health.

What’s new in C# 3.0?
What’s new in Visual Basic 9?
Building Web Applications with Visual Studio 2008

I was at SliverLight training all last week with a group of Developer Evangelists and we could not stop laughing about the xkcd.com comic below. I know it's way geeky but wow I had no idea how geeky, after half an hour of trying to explaining it to my wife it finally sunk in just how geeky.

I have not read the entire document yet (I will save that for the flight home today) but this is an interesting report. This shows why I have a job, MS has made huge investments in security at all levels but the worlds perception is that we still are not secure, my job to help show the world what the investments we have made mean for users of our products.

Download the report here: Internet Explorer and Firefox Vulnerability Analysis

Just announced Parallel Extensions to the .NET Framework I had not know we were going to CTP with this but it's a huge features that will solve a lot of problems!

Wow SliverLight 2.0 and now this... too much good stuff not enough time in the day!

You should read it... it's all good!

.NET Web Product Roadmap (ASP.NET, Silverlight, IIS7) 

For a lot of ASP.NET developers this may not seam like a big deal but for cgi users out there this is huge! With FastCGI the windows platform is now a first class citizen for cgi applications. Now PHP developers have a wider choice of platforms. And from a ASP.NET developers perspective now that have away to add functionally or migrate functionally to a more structured environment.

Details on the www.iis.net web site download from there as well.

The Visual Studio partner team has put together a resource DVD with products and information from over 90 Visual Studio partners. It’s loaded with more than 100 add-ins and packages—full and trial versions. You’ll get tools, languages, and components that can help you develop applications for Windows®, Web services, and mobile devices.

From these examples you can find out just how flexible & extendable Visual Studio is. 

You can order their own DVD, free of charge, at: http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/extend/partnerdvd/

Yep today, Steve Ballmer at the the Web 2.0 Summit announced that Popfly has moved from closed alpha to open beta! So now go fourth and mash!

If you have not looked at Popfly check out the overview info about with and the Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 (for the new JavaScript editing) you can build some fun "blocks" of functionality.

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