In the October 2008 issue of the MSPA Newsletter, read about:

• Helping Partners with Architecture and Design Challenges.  Whether our partners are building a new solution or updating an existing one, they usually face critical architectural decisions that could impact their product as it gets built, delay the product or present adverse effects over time. Many of our partners have architects and senior designers in house to handle these challenges effectively. However, our partners often seek help and advice from Microsoft Services to make sure that they make well-informed decisions during the design stage, rather than spending extra time and effort to fix problems that crop up after deployment.  Read more from Alok Srivastava about architecture and design and learn about the services that we offer our MSPA customers in this area.
• ALM (Application Lifecycle Management) and Silverlight are all the rage these days.  In this month’s newsletter, we highlight some services that we offer around these key technologies.
• Application Compatibility.  Naturally, with the releases of Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008, we have seen an increase in the number of requests from our ISVs around the topic of application compatibility on the newest operating systems. We have consultants that are dedicated to application compatibility; they provide guidance and advice to our partners on this topic and often engage in Application Compatibility Labs in Redmond, WA and throughout the United States. We have a number of videos where you can meet the consultants and learn from their experiences and advice.
• Upcoming tech talks and open registration workshops that you can sign up for today.  In October, we have scheduled tech talks for VSTS/TFS 2008 and Silverlight 2 --  these are tech talks that we deliver exclusively to our MSPA customers.  The newsletter also contains a listing of the workshops open for registration in various locations throughout the US.