This is some pre-pdc stuff that caught my eye: Gartner on the Cloud Landscape . Windows Azure fairs extremely well. Scalability survey of cloud platforms . Benchmarking cloud alternatives – interesting stuff. FabrikamShipping SaaS , a complete demo scenario meant to help ISVs to target the Windows Azure...

A long overdue “brain dump” of stuff that I found interesting. Development related: WPF vs Silverlight A detailed look at the differences (and similarities) between the two. “Size vs features, full trust vs sandboxed” Changes to the compatibility modes in Windows 7 – new to me. Meet “RunAsHighest” A...

Development related: Persistence ignorance in the Entity Framework discussed with reference to the EFPocoAdapter http://railsenvy.com/ Lots of Ruby and Rails stuff – and some good podcasts and video Scott Hanselman has listed his “must haves” on a machine rebuild. Always illuminating to see other techies...

Development related: Extend IE7 and IE8: Make extending IE7 and IE8 that much easier with a little spicIE :-) With SpicIE you can develop your own event handlers, toolbar buttons, menu entries, toolbars and more. Free software for students: UK secondary school students can get free developer software...