OK, so I moved my new Alex Barnett blog to here for a number of reasons, explained here at my, er, new blog .

I've not met Frank Arrigo in person, but I know about his shirt. In the latest episode of the 'Frank and His Shirt' reality show series, the hunt is on for an apparent posuer . The background to this rather potracted saga is a story unto itself, even getting press coverage in the local IT...

Congrats to Betsy and the team : the Windows Live QnA service is now in public beta. I've been on the private beta for a little while and turned to it for help for a couple of things when I got stuck. One example was asking for good seafood restaurants in Seattle . I tried out one of the recommendations...

A video on how to make a YouTube video using Windows Movie Maker, on YouTube , made using Windows Movie Maker ...

Somasega introduces the ' Top 10 Ways to Light Up Your Windows Vista Apps ' 1. Follow the Windows Vista style guidelines 2. Enrich the user experience 3. Enable users to visualize, organize, and search 4. Run securely 5. Design for reliability and manageability 6. Establish a customer feedback loop...

Kevin Briody of the Windows Live team has published the RSS feeds he subscribes to as OPML files for your feedreader. Some good feeds worth checking out there, including a bunch of Windows Live individual employee and team blogs. Kevin, one way of displaying these as a blogroll is to use Grazr . Below...

Mitch Ratcliffe spotted a column published ealier this month on the FT. The article, written columinst John Plender , proposes that a leveraged buyout of Microsoft by private equity bankers would be a good thing. As Mitch points out, this scenario would be a good thing for the private equity bankers...

Laura John (who I used to work with while we were both at MSDN / TechNet), has blogged about something I've not heard of before...Windows Live WiFi: "We provide dial-up access to a ton of users across the United States but we've also been working on a stealth project that we're now ready to Beta...

As you probably know by now, Dean Hachamovitch announced this morning that Internet Explorer 7 Release Candidate 1 (RC1) is ready for download . So what is the difference between a 'Release Candidate' (RC) and a 'Beta'? Here's the short answer from Dean's post: "A release candidate is fundamentally...

150 cool Windows XP downloads . via JoshBlog

Tim Sneath asks : "What's the most impressive WPF demo you can construct in a single line of XAML? Can you improve on these?"

Korby on CodePlex : "My take, from the trenches, is that CodePlex is Microsoft doing what it has always done: quietly supporting the needs and expressed wishes of our most important customers: developers developers developers developers, the fine folks who write the awesome applications that run...

Meet Erik. Erik Meijer is an Architect in Microsoft's Data Programmability team. As you can see from these pics he let me shoot in his office, Erik keeps a penguin... I first knew of Erik when he was starring as the 'Head in the Box' on VBTV . (I wish I had a pic for you - you'll just have...

The Made In Express Contest is reaching its conclusion - there are a total of 10 finalists' projects and now it is time to pick the winners...Who will win? Well, that's really up to you . My personal favorite is the Instant IM Translation . I confess - I've not played with the app - but the idea works...

The ADO.NET vNext Community Technology Preview ('CTP') went live today...Hopefully I can convince Tommy Williams to write up his 'from the trenches' post once he's recovered ;-) Anyways, on to the LINQs links: Today Announcing: The ADO.NET vNext August CTP , by Pablo Castro ADO.NET vNext...

A few more links for you... 'Hirlpoo West' points out one of the two plugins Tim Heuer has already developed for Windows Live Writer - a plugin that makes it a doddle to insert Flickr images. The other plugin Tim has developed is a Technorati tagging plugin. Also, Danny Ayers should be pleased...

Oh goodie! Pac-man released on Xbox Live Arcade today. As much as I love all those mutli-million dollar production shoot-em-ups and RPGs, there's nothing quite like retro monster munching to soothe away the stresses of the day. Via Major Nelson .

Bill's favorite pastime is to play Bridge. Via Todd Bishop , here's a pic of him playing last week . I think the cap is real - Photoshop anyone ? Talking of bluffs and the bizarre, I was amazed to read this story of a Norwegian journalist, Bjørn Benkow, who has finally admitted to completely inventing...

Well, I just read Niall's post explaining that he is leaving Microsoft . Niall was recruited in April to help the Windows Live team build an RSS / Atom based syndication platform for consumption across devices. Like Scoble , I'm sorry to see Niall go. Niall really grokks the RSS / syndicated space...

Yes, you read that right. LINQ to Amazon . "This example introduces Linq to Amazon , which allows querying Amazon for books using Linq! It uses Linq's extensibility to allow for language-integrated queries against a book catalog. The Linq query gets converted to REST URLs supported by Amazon's...

Tim O'Reilly's series of posts on book sales are giving up lots of interesting data and trends from the Nielsen Bookscan's top 3,000 Computer Books report (means: all publishers not just O'Reilly sales, but US sales only). Yesterday's post was no different in terms of juicy data. This is the 3-year...

Classic Digg bait: Keep Sites Running Smoothly By Avoiding These 10 Common ASP.NET Pitfalls: "Here are 10 of the pitfalls that litter the path to releasing your production ASP.NET applications, and what you can do to avoid them. All of the examples draw from my experiences with real companies building...

If you like microformats and / or RSS you'll love it. If you don't know about microformats and / or RSS you need to watch it. Channel9 interviews Matt Augustine and Paresh Suthar about Live Clipboard and Simple Sharing Extensions (SSE).

A few days ago I grumbled at the poor state of the search engines specializing in syndicated (RSS'd or Atomized) content. Today, Michael Marshall Patrick is enthusiastically supporting a proposed standard by Bloglines that is trying to solve an apparent problem: "“Everything you blog goes on...

I've been OOF since the beginning of last week, back in tomorrow. Adam was also OOF last week and has pic to prove it: While on the topic of email @ Microsoft, check out Joe's 1 year @ Microsoft post .