Ian Moulster's blog

Some day I'll be able to stop blogging about this competition and get back to blogging about other things, that is assuming I have anyone left who reads my blog besides you competition folks. In the interim.... Two pieces of news: 1) After much...

I'm very pleased to announce that we have now sent the emails to the winners of the UK developer online launch competition, 1000 Windows Vista and 1000 Microsoft Office. Please make sure you check your junk mail box too just in case! The subject line...

I have received an update on the shipping date, we're likely to start shipping during week commencing 12 March. This also applies to the copies for people who attended the physical launch event.

There have been quite a few comments to various of my blog entries, all covering the competition, so rather than try to answer them all individually I'll try to cover them here: 1) People have mentioned that while they saw London Underground on stage...

I have just received the first set of data re the number of winners in the launch competition. The answer may surprise you: We've had many (many!) thousands of entries, and I can confirm that we're past the 1000 mark for Windows Vista winners. However...

This may be passé now but just to make sure everyone is aware: the Office prizes did indeed get sent out yesterday. I wanted to get a confirmation from the distribution centre before posting this entry and I now have that, so we’re nearing the end of...

I have asked for an update from the team that is getting the copies of Windows Vista and Microsoft Office to send to the winners and delegates at the Thames Valley Park event. The word is still "early March", which is what we expected. Thought it worth...

Update: The program will close on Friday June 30th 2006 In case you weren't aware, we are only providing a limited number of copies of Windows Vista Beta 2 - either download or physical copies - and we're fast approaching the cut-off point. What...

According to my account summary page I'm at my 7 year anniversary as a user of Hotmail - I first registered way back in December 2000. So I feel like I'm an old hand but I bet there are plenty of people who have been with Hotmail longer. Who can beat...

A while ago, I posted a blog entry about a free software giveaway we were planning for the UK online developer launch event. As I haven't said much about it since you may wonder if it's actually going ahead. Well have no fear, yes it's absolutely going...

You may have to refresh your browser to see it, but to save you the bother the link is here: http://www.microsoft.com/uk/launch2007/dev/competition.mspx It's also on the left-hand nav

I thought I'd start a new post to save people trying to find comments on the last one, as there are a couple of pieces of news for people waiting to hear more about the software giveaway for the UK developer launch: I have had confirmation that...

Live.com has a cool feature that allows you to look up your flight status really easily. If you know your flight just enter “flight status” along with your flight number into the search box, eg if I was meeting someone from British Airways flight BA10...

Although feature names aren't the most exciting thing to talk about, I do like to get them right if I can (although I'm still getting my mind around the 2007 Microsoft Office System). Anyhow, we've just finalised the names of some Vista features -...

If you're in EMEA and have been looking for a way to get your hands on trial versions of Visual Studio 2005, there's now a site where you can download or order a DVD/CD: http://www.microsoft.com/emea/msdn/visualstudio/enxu/getthetrials/ Products available...

UPDATE: Just to correct a few misquotes I've seen, I'm not predicting release dates, just saying that if you take part in the online launch and are one of the lucky 1000 we'll send a copy when the products are available. I'm not saying whether these products...

As I’ve hinted previously, we’re planning a developer launch event in the UK for 19th and 20th January 2007. I’m now able to provide some additional details including the registration link: http://www.microsoft.com/uk/launch2007/dev/default.mspx ...

In case you didn't see this elsewhere, if you're an MSDN subscriber you can download Visual Studio 2008 right away. And .NET 3.5 of course. All very cool. While there are a whole host of new features (and the Moth's blog is a great place to read about...

I love working at Microsoft. And that's not as sickly sweet as it sounds, it really is a fun place to work. There's always interesting stuff going on and lots of incredibly clever people around. Another cool thing is that I work for the richest man in...

I can confirm that the "thank you" email has now been sent to attendees of the first day UK developer launch. If you only attended the second day, that email goes out at midnight tonight. Why? Different systems apparently. So why is this important...

When people find out I work for Microsoft they often ask “so what technologies should I be aware of that are coming down the line?”. Of course I’m a developer-focused person so my answer is always relevant to developers. And actually it’s a really valid...

In case you haven’t already heard it from elsewhere we have decided to include Expression Blend and Expression Web in MSDN Premium subscriptions, and the other two Expression products (Expression Design and Expression Media) in the team suite subscription...

We've had some reports of people have "file corrupted" messages from some of the videos they download from www.microsoft.com/uk/launch2007/dev . We're looking into this, looks like the download is interrupted which causes the problem ie it doesn't download...

Folks - my apologies, but we've taken the decision to pull the download option for the videos. It's a classic case of "death by success" - we have so many people downloading that even with a massive pipe people are still seeing poor download speeds, as...

I've been having a discussion with some of my colleagues regarding how good a job we've done (and are doing) at explaining what WinFX actually contains. In the interests of keeping everyone on the same page, I'm talking about a description of WinFX...