The one and only Dave Lemphers is coming back to Australia for a week at the end of February for a whirlwind tour of the country to coincide with the launch in Australia of Windows Azure . He'll be doing public technical briefings hosted by the user groups in 5 capital cities. Date/Time ...

There was a question on one of the internal lists today: "Looking for a no-brainer way to demo just adding a simple button to Office that goes to a URL." It’s going to work a little differently in Word & Excel than it does in Outlook. Word/Excel/Etc (apps with Ribbon) For a Word/Excel addin...

CodeCampOz is fast approaching - (4-5 April in Wagga Wagga). Mitch has announced the speakers and sessions , and talked about the important social aspects of CodeCamp , in addition to the obvious technical benefits. Looks like another great CodeCamp! What are you waiting for? Sign up NOW!

Update – Wow! that was quick! All the spots are gone. Sorry about that. Dave beat me to it , but anyway … Next week, 10-12 March, Chris Auld is running a three day dive into the Azure platform in the Sydney CBD. There is some great material, it’s free, and we feed you! If you’re interested in attending...

I was chatting to some community folk in the pub last night after presenting (on Architectural patterns on S+S – slides here ) at the Sydney Deep .NET User Group *. I heard an interesting premise: “Good developers don’t want to do SharePoint development because it’s too easy”. To me, this passes the...

Got this note from Jordan Knight today. Looks like a great new group staring up with some smart people in Melbourne. The Silverlight Designer and Developer Network Starts Next Week! Launching next week, the SDDN, which is part of Victoria .NET,  is a new special interest group completely and absolutely...

Fin asked me to write this week’s MSDN Flash editorial, so I did. In case you missed it, here it is. By the way, if you don’t subscribe to the flash, you should :). Sign up today ! It's been a real time for me with events. First the PDC in Los Angeles with over 6,000 developers (in case you missed it...

Developers, Developers, Developers! As part of a whirlwind visit to Sydney early next month, Steve Ballmer will be presenting Microsoft's future vision for developers in the world of software-plus-services. He'll discuss the next wave of technologies just launched at the Professional Developer Conference...

Hot on the heels of other great training kits , we’ve released the Azure Services Training Kit . From the internal announcement email: Today we are making available the first preview release of the Azure Services Training Kit.  The Azure Services Training Kit will include hands-on labs, presentations...

One of the common questions I get asked when I do sessions on VSTO / OBA development is "how can I target Office 2003 and Office 2007?" (I also get asked about previous versions of Office, but I have a less helpful response there). Mary Lee's done a great post about this very topic as has Andrew...

Following Kleefy 's not so unexpected announcement , I've taken over the Technology of TechEd Track for this year's TechEd Australia event. Here's the spiel that I wrote for the track. Come on a journey behind the scenes at Tech•Ed. This track will take you end-to-end in the technology deployed...

I had a great time presenting at the Perth SharePoint User Group last Tuesday. I've uploaded my deck to my SkyDrive if you're interested. The session talked about surfacing relevant information in the context in which it's needed. The example I gave is of a sales person who gets an email from a customer...

I went to see the clever folk at Vivid Group yesterday. Being clever, they've already established an internal user group of sorts, but they're often looking for compelling content to deliver. Fortunately, I was able to point them to some great resources. The various Visual Studio Training Kits provide...

The VSTO team have been hard at work both with their work on .NET3.5SP1 and on other things to enhance your VSTO development experience. recently, they released a series of OBA Sample Application Kits. Christin Boyd blogged about them on the VSTO team blog , as did Erika . If you’re looking for...

From Khawar Ahmed on the OBA Blog : One of the OBA related news at TechEd Developer Barcelona was about the availability of S+S BluePrints. These are open source frameworks designed to make it easier to build S+S applications. These frameworks include source code, guidance, structured step-by-step workflow...

I'm in Perth as a result of GITA inviting me to speak at their Seminar and Workshops . I presented on MapPoint Web Services and showed a sneak peek of SQL Server 2008 's Spatial capabilities (here's another white paper ). My slides are available here . The demo app I showed is here . (Don't forget...

26-Sep Updated table formatting "If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants" Isaac Newton 1676* As a Developer Evangelist, I'm often talking about the value of "the Platform" and sometimes it takes a little while for people to see that value. I like to tell a story about...

As I posted previously , Grahame Seach is pulling together the community Office DevCon in Sydney this November (3-4). The website is now live with the list of 29 sessions and speakers, information about the conference and the facilities, as well as a registration link. Sign Up Now! There's also another...

I just got this note from Faith Rees about some exciting .NET 3.0 training being conducted by our partner, Readify . Contact them directly for more info. Juval Lowy’s Windows Communication Foundation MasterClass– Registrations close 21 September Juval Lowy is returning to Australia by popular demand...

Tatham and Dr Neil alluded to it in their fishbowl interview , and now Anna 's been plugging it too. From the developers of ViaVirtualEarth , there's a new site for Windows Live developers . Check out the plethora of topics on the nav bar:

As you might expect, there's been a bit of discussion on the internal aliases about the results of ISO ballot DIS29500 . Kleefy asked me about resources for developers wanting to write apps that read and/or write the new formats regardless of the programming language. Of course, I pointed him at http...

This just in: Learn how to leave complex and costly integration behind, and turn IT into a truly strategic asset. Register your place at "Extending the Connected Enterprise" now, and discover how BizTalk Server 2006 R2 allows diverse systems inside and outside businesses to talk to each other – enabling...

David Kelly, our HPC Guy sent me this today - contact me if you're interested in coming along and I'll forward to David: Microsoft intends to run free Windows Compute Cluster Server training at our Sydney office on September 18 and 19. The agenda will include the following components: Infrastructure...