With PDC just about a week over, it's about time I finally got around to blogging about it. Here's the random list Windows Azure : Ray Ozzie launched Windows Azure and Microsoft's Cloud Strategy (video here). Charles on Channel 9 did a bunch of videos on our Cloud services. If you want a no nonsense...

Kudos to the Popfly team for adding new features in their July update. My favorite features are the pre-loading of assets which will pre-load images, audio, video before a game starts so it doesn't lag out and the High Score service. The full list of features can be found on the Popfly Team blog.  ...

Adam Nathan recently blogged about some of the new features they've added to Popfly Game Creator including the color swapper for skinning actors, guidelines and snapping for aligning characters, actor stamping for easier tiling, new events, and the ability to clone a level! All-in-all, this should make...

Popfly Game Creator Alpha launches today and It's amazing. Kudos to Adam Nathan as he's really shown how Silverlight can build incredibly rich applications. I can only imagine what he'll do when Popfly moves to Silverlight 2! Here's the Channel 9 interview with Adam building three Popfly games from scratch...

This is Episode #2 of This Week on Channel 9 a weekly recap show of our favorite things for developers including Channel9 videos, samples, bloggers, news, and much more. This week we cover: 0. Changes to the show based on feedback, our name courtesy of Ian and ChadK , and Benny Hill style...

Last night, I caught up with Scott Guthrie and we talked about the up-and-coming technology that will be shown at Mix . I just posted Part 1 of the video onto Channel9 where we discuss IIS 7.0 and what it means for developers. I'll post Part 2 tomorrow, where Scott delves deeper into the technology...

I'm back in Seattle after attending TechEd Europe earlier in the week. It was an absolute blast and thanks to everyone who came to the overflowed Popfly session! Tony Goodhew and I did demos in Soma's keynote, check out Patrik and Andrew's blogs for a recap on the keynote: Patrik Löwendahl's: ...

The Facebook is a "Walled Garden" meme continues today with a post from pal Robert Scoble that continues the assumption that all Facebook data is somehow "locked" into Facebook. Here's a quick snippet: First, let’s go back to Facebook. Why does everyone say it’s a “walled garden?” Because you can’t get...

A lot of long hours and hard work later, we officially launched Popfly as a private alpha!! What the heck is it? Popfly is the fun, easy way for anyone to build and share mashups, gadgets, Web pages, and applications. Popfly consists of two parts: 1. Popfly Creator is a set of online visual...

Zack Owens is looking for volunteers to assist with a new open source CodePlex project that builds onthe existing Club Site Starter Kit. Some of the features he's looking to add include: Bug Fixes Forums FCK Editor Web Administration Poll Control RSS AJAX Themes Searching...

I officially voted today, but I avoided the lines by using an absentee ballot. It really is the way to go. Someone internally sent out a link to this nice site on CNN that let's you track the results of the US election: http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2004/pages/results/president/ You'll need Flash to view...

ASP.NET developers should be aware of the ASP.NET canonicalization vulnerability. More information here: http://www.microsoft.com/security/incident/aspnet.mspx BGold shares some good info here: http://blogs.msdn.com/bgold/archive/2004/10/05/238449.aspx

Ouch, this morning I experienced the pain Cyrus felt recently, I had to listen to 80's music for the drive into work on C89.5 FM. Painful. I only listen to C89.5 when Howard Stern is on commercial (which last approx 10 minutes and happen every twenty minutes). I definitely agree with Cyrus though, Nocturnal...

Fascinating, I would totally go see this (from NewYorkish ) “How do you get people in a small Southern city interested in the performing arts? You do what a ballet company in Roanoke, Virginia did and develop NASCAR ballet, a show where "modern dancers (who represent cars) circle a forty foot...

MSN Careers has a quick article on job burnout, below are the symptoms: 1. chronic fatigue - exhaustion, tiredness, a sense of being physically run down 2. anger at those making demands 3. self-criticism for putting up with the demands 4. cynicism, negativity, and irritability 5. a sense of being...

From memefirst , we see the power of one of the most powerful substances in the world, the cocoa bean. According to this article, it's strong enough to either make you divulge your password or lie to a researcher. As a chocoholic who needs at least a hershey kiss to “cleanse the pallette“...

Jeff Key has a handy tip on removing the /// comments for the default C# project templates in VS 2003. While I don't like the comments, my pet peeve is that ASP.NET uses “Grid“ layout by default. For your sanity, below are the directions for how to “go with the flow“. Changing...

Any MechAssault fan should appreciate this 12' “robot” coming out of Japan. How much longer until Jump Jets, Warhammer missiles and heat sinks are added? A Japanese company unveiled a 3.5-metre (11.55-foot) tall robot that can forage its way through a heap of debris as a trailblazer for...

Wow! Thomas Lewis who works on the ASP.NET evangelism team (and who recently gave me some good feedback on starter kits) sends this gem from Netcraft . In this month's Web Server Survey the number of IP addresses with sites using ASP.NET has overtaken those using JSP and Java Servlets. The number...

In the Q&A after my ASP.NET talks at MDC, someone asked whether the new ASP.NET 2.0 TreeView control can render nodes and subnodes in languages that read from right to left like Arabic. I tried testing this by dropping a TreeView control and looked for *some* property that would let me use character...

Not sure if others have seen this yet, but this is pretty funny - www.slashnot.com

This is hilarious http://www.adequacy.org/public/stories/2001.12.2.42056.2147.html   Some choice quotes for knowing whether your son is a hacker: 2. Are you finding programs on your computer that you don't remember installing? Your son will probably try to install some hacker...

Gus wrote Space Invaders in C#  ( source ). Sweet! Speaking of Space Invaders, there is a Space Invader urban invasion  art project that lists "invaded" cities (cities with Space Invader graffiti).  Seattle has yet to be invaded, but to the surprise of no one, New York has...

ThinkingIn.NET  points out this great article on estimating the airspeed of an unladen swallow  (both african and european).  Classic.

Wired magazine points out how Friendster isn't so friendly and how lots of people are migrating over to Emode or Tribe .  I haven't tried eMode, but Tribe is nice if nothing more then the geographic tie-in...  I'd love to see Friendster get a web service where I can poll for my...