From Dan Fernandez : "We are incredibly excited to announce that effective April 19th, 2006, all Visual Studio 2005 Express Editions including Visual Basic, Visual C#, Visual J#, Visual C++, and Visual Web Developer Express will be free permanently!" This is very exciting for students and faculty...

What can teachers and students work on now that the AP exam is over? Hunt for the Wombat is a 4-6 week project designed to give AP Computer Science students the opportunity to apply their programming skills, gain broader awareness and understanding of the software development process and have fun along...

In case you missed it check out 2/3 of the KPL team on Channel 9 (44 minutes). Lots of stuff on the next version--nice!

Brian Goldfarb from the ASP.NET team just posted about a new series of "How Do I..." videos . I just watched the " Web parts and Personalization " and if it's any indication of the rest of the series, this is going to be EXCELLENT! Enjoy!

If you haven't checked out the "Seventeen minutes with Bill Gates" interview on Channel 9, I *highly* recommend doing so. Very open, honest, relaxed interview--really enjoyed it. Don Dodge has a nice Cliff's Notes summary here .

It would be a good use of an hour of YOUR time as well to check out this Behind the Code interview with Anders Hejlsberg . JEEZ...that guy has done a LOT of interesting stuff.

A very cool effort by my team--a "geek cruise" to connect with professors on the topic of Gaming in curriculum. It is ALSO cool that this was picked up by Forbes (I guess there was a bit of an inside track!). Pat Phillips has 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 good posts about her experience—lots of great nuggets.

I've been promising this for a while but it's FINALLY here! Here’s the quick scoop; Info for students: You will compete, directly online, with students all over the US to see who has the best programming skills. brings together an imaginative background story , comic-style graphics and fun programming...

Huh? Mint Source is a cool tool from the UK Developer team--built by an intern actually--that let's you play around with Express to build a system tray RSS aggregator. Fresh... :)

Gosh, it seems like this took FOREVER! Glad that the Visual Studio Express Editions are finally here and REALLY glad that they are available FREE ! :) From Dan Fernandez’s blog : I am proud to announce that today, November 7th 2005, we officially released the downloadable versions...

If you’re into application development, of course you know that today is a big day . Especially exciting, IMO, if you’re into Web development. Lots of things are updated; -the Visual Web Developer Express (VWDX) page (I dig the purple—I may have to order this just to have the box...

Maybe you’ve heard of Orange County Choppers , which is the featured bike builder on American Chopper which airs on Discovery Channel. OCC are proud users of Microsoft technologies . They are definitely at or near the top of the list of “cool” companies running their business on Microsoft...

Not sure how many other universities are doing this but University of Washington is offering lectures via podcast . Missed class? No worries—just download it to your iPod! “Lectures in Kane have often been videotaped for student viewing, but that means the student must go to the library...

Pretty excited that Imagine Cup is coming soon. What is Imagine Cup? If you don't know... “Microsoft’s Imagine Cup is the world’s premier student technology competition. It’s an opportunity for top young minds from around the globe to use technology to solve some of the planet’s toughest problems...

Apparently not. The Saturday after PDC some of my colleagues on the Academic team met with a group students to discuss “digital lifestyle”. Chris Avis was there and took some good notes. A couple of things strike me about this; 1) Windows is not cool. These kids clearly don’t...

Microsoft’s VP of Human Resources, Lisa Brummel , sent out a note about this past week that truly humbled and inspired me. The note highlighted some of the contributions that teams and individual employees have made to Katrina victims doing what we do best – using technology to solve problems...

I know that every blogger at Microsoft has posted the Bill Gates interview on Channel 9 , but I have a bit of different take. I was pretty excited to hear Bill’s take on getting students energized about CS and software careers. Like Bill, I’m proud to be a geek, I believe that geeks have...

ATTENTION TEACHERS—LOOKING FOR YOUR INPUT! My colleague Jay Schmelzer from the Visual Basic Team is looking for your feedback for future versions of Visual Studio and how it can help Academia. I would say that today, Visual Studio is almost TOO robust for most academic scenarios. To some extent, this...

I posted previously about Project Aardvark ; Well the interns have finally shipped their summer project — Fog Creek Copilot 1.0 has shipped ! Congrats to the team! How cool is that for these students? Your Summer internships results in a shipping product…awesome stuff. Although I must say, as a person...

DigiGirlz is a great student outreach effort that the Microsoft Diversity Team puts on here in the Seattle area. There will be 80 high school girls visiting Microsoft campus for 4 days. They’ll meet female executives, take a tour of Game Test labs and build their own “ mad libs ” project. I had the chance...

The Microsoft Learning team has launched 8 FREE e-learning courses for Visual Studio 2005 . Free until November 8th--get it while you can! :) Tags: Visual Studio , Whidbey

The Coding4Fun guys are at it again . This is about the coolest thing I've ever seen! First it's cool because it's the first video podcast entry (yes, the feed will include a video file in your podcast catcher). Second it's cool because you can combine coding and home automation. Some sample scenarios...

Tom Indelicato , Computer Science teacher from New Hampshire, was kind enough to write up his impressions on the newest version of Visual Studio . Nice quick overview of the key feature updates. Just wait Tom--it's going to get even better! ;) Tags: Visual Studio , Whidbey , .NET , Computer Science

This is pretty cool. Instant J# helps generate J# code from Visual Basic code. Given the huge VB community out there and the plethora of code samples floating around, this could be a great learning tool. For students and faculty looking to bring their Java skills to the .NET Framework. Curious to know...

After much anticipation we've locked down the Webcast calendar over on MainFunction (you'll need to sign-in). All of the pieces have been lined up including our ability to grant continuing education units (CEUs) --we'll be getting things started on Monday August 8th. We finally worked out the schedule...