Over the past several years, the Visual Studio team has been actively working on ways to hear from you (our customer) and continue to improve our developer tools and frameworks. The Developer Division even built an entire portal (Microsoft Connect ) exclusively...

Over the next few weeks, we’re going to be making some changes to the Visual Studio Connect site , which is used for product feedback and downloads. Many of the changes are to the back end, and should not be noticeable to our users. We are migrating...

Visual Studio 2010 has officially been released, or as the cool kids say, RTM'ed. There are a ton of links I could list here, but it's probably better to just point everyone to ground-zero for Visual Studio, which is the Visual Studio MSDN site ( http...

I spent a couple of weeks in February hammering out a VS 2010 article for MSDN magazine. I tried to pick a collection of new things in the tool and/or runtime that would help developers be more productive. The article is here . http://msdn.microsoft...

Cloud computing is rapidly ascending into the mainstream as a viable alternative to traditional on-premises architectures. Putting an application into *the cloud* is not as abstract is the term might sound. Deploying to the cloud is a term for allowing...

These days, our users have growing expectations around integrating UI with the platform. The days of mere functionality are fading, and now more than ever, developers have to deliver client solutions that cleanly mesh with the desktop, giving a connected...

As the old adage goes, the only constant thing in life is change. For the past 5 years, I've thoroughly enjoyed working as a Developer Evangelist here at Microsoft. The title always seems to raise eyebrows, especially here in the deep South, where the...

Brian Hitney and his community have pulled together a *brand spanking new* .NET U course for ASP.NET development. If you are not familiar with .NET U, it is a 1-day free training for developers, with the extra spin of making all the content available...

If you've ever wondered about who is behind TechEd, and all the goings on that accompany a conference of this magnitude, this interview with Kim is pretty fascinating stuff.

If you don't know or follow Keith and Chris, you should. and here's an easy way to do so: http://keithelder.net/blog/archive/2008/05/29/Deep-Fried-Bytes-Podcast-Is-Live.aspx Yes, it's true, Deep Fried Bytes was actually available as a URL. :-)

Lindsay Rutter , a DE from near Philadelphia, is kicking off a 6-part webcast on Silverlight 2.0 . This is a great opportunity to get a look at some of the upcoming features, so you'll want to tune in. You can get all the details and register here : http...

May Meeting The May meeting of the Steel City SQL user group will be next Tuesday the 20th at New Horizons Learning Center on Beacon Parkway. New Horizons has offered to sponsor the group by providing pizza for the meeting (Thanks New Horizons, for doing...

http://adoguy.com/2008/05/06/Executing_Code_on_the_UI_Thread_in_Silverlight_2.aspx Nice info (as usual), Shawn.

Details are here : http://hubcitynug.org/ It's a great time to get involved with helping run the UG. Many thanks to Keith Elder and Aubrey Cote for getting the ball rolling on this. Make sure you get on the mailing list (available on the site) to stay...

My colleague Joe Healy has assembled an amazing weekend of activity, nicely squeezed between the Developer and Infrastructure weeks at TechEd Orlando. There is a site that lists all the activities, which include Code Camps, .NET Us, Open Space discussions...

The next Augusta Developers Guild meeting will be held on Thursday, May 29th, 2008 at 6PM at Augusta State University. Karl Shifflett will be presenting Mole Visualizer For Visual Studio. Please RSVP so we know how much food to order. More information...

Thought this was an interesting survey . http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9082558 I'm still not sure exactly how you specifically classify someone as a *Web 2.0 developer*, but whoever they are, they...

That's the first time I've seen Sync. I have to say, it's pretty cool. http://blogs.msdn.com/chabrook/archive/2008/04/10/ford-sync.aspx

Check out Bob's blog , which includes a 4-part series on Silverlight 2.0. Wow, monster blog entry, Bob! nice job! http://blogs.msdn.com/bobfamiliar/archive/2008/04/04/rich-internet-applications-using-silverlight-2-0.aspx

Microsoft MVP and overall nice guy Keith Elder will be speaking at the Lower Alabama .NET User Group 's May 27th Meeting. Keith is a great speaker, so you want to be sure to make this one. Presenter: Keith Elder Topic: Windows Workflow Foundation Time...

Please be aware that the user group meeting location has changed , and will now be held at Gwinnett Technical College (thanks to Sean Gerety for helping out with that). The meeting will be in Building 100, Room 401.

The East Tennessee .NET User Group has some interesting events on the horizon. Here's a snippet from their latest newsletter: "Next week, Tommy Norman will be showing us how to use Team Foundation System in a Scrum development environment. Starting in...

SOA Society Meeting Monday April 21, Starting 6:00 PM New Horizons Birmingham Dashboards, Collaboration, Portals and MORE! The SOA Society is going to meet on Monday April 21 this month. This is a change from our usual meeting time of the 4th Tuesday...

If your community is planning on holding a Code Camp, please feel free to use the new Silverlight Code Camp Site template built by MVP Todd Miranda and hosted on CodePlex . http://www.codeplex.com/silverlightcodecamp Also, feel free to get involved as...

The Gwinnett Georgia Microsoft User Group (GGMUG) will have their inaugural user group meeting on May 8th at 6:00PM at Gwinnett Technical College (note, this is a location change) . Noah Subrin and I will be speaking for the first meeting. I'll do...