November, 2011

Don't miss the chance to attend this intensive two-day course that will provide you first-hand experience directly from the most authoritative experts on PowerPivot! To learn more and to register, visit http://www.powerpivotworkshop.com/ About the Book Transform your skills, data, and business—with the power user’s guide to PowerPivot for Excel. Led by two business intelligence (BI) experts, you’ll learn how to create and share your own BI solutions using software you already know and love: Microsoft Excel. Discover how to extend your existing skills, using the PowerPivot add-in to quickly turn mass quantities of data into meaningful information and on-the-job results—no programming required. The book introduces you to PowerPivot functionality, then takes...

Greetings. Zain Naboulsi, coauthor of Coding Faster: Getting More Productive with Microsoft Visual Studio (which covers Visual Studio 2005, 2008, and 2010), is presenting “The Ultimate Guide to Visual Studio 2010 - Coding, Debugging, Modeling, Testing, Building and Deployment” three times in the American Midwest in December. Here’s a description of the class: Visual Studio 2010 is packed with new and enhanced features to help you create the best code possible and simplify your entire development process from design to deployment. Microsoft experts will show off the powerful new tools that Visual Studio 2010 brings to your tool box. Essential Tips for the Professional Developer. Most of us use Visual Studio but do we really know how to USE it? We will show you the top tips and tricks that can...

In celebration of Cyber Monday, we're featuring 60 ebooks: 20 new releases, our current 20 top sellers, and 20 of our most popular picks of recent memory. Use discount code CYBERMONDAY . This deal expires 2011-11-29 and may not be combined with other offers. For example, you can get Richard Banks’s The future of looking back for $8.00. Start here .

In the spirit of Cyber Monday, today we’d like to share an interview with Richard Banks, author of the first book in Microsoft Press’s new Microsoft Research series, The future of looking back   (ISBN: 978-0-7356-5806-6) . The interview, by Anna Farmery, is here . Here’s some of Anna’s description of the interview: The nature and differences of keeping 'physical things' and saving 'digital things.' How the ability to save everything digitally is removing the need for filtering of memories, of items you want to keep in your life. How do you save the sentiment attached to the items - do we need to find a way of digitally saving sentiment? The idea of the backup box - to capture your life as an ongoing project. Don't underestimate the value of a tweet, the value of a mundane diary entry....

Updated for ASP.NET MVC 3, Dino Esposito’s Programming Microsoft ASP.NET MVC, Second Edition , is now available. You can see the book’s “Contents at a Glance” and read its Introduction in this earlier post . In this post we share an excerpt from one of the book’s chapters, Chapter 7, “Design Considerations for ASP.NET MVC Controllers.” Here’s the book part the chapter comes from: PART II   ASP.NET MVC Software Design CHAPTER 5  Aspects of ASP.NET MVC Applications. . . . . . . . . .189 CHAPTER 6  Securing Your Application  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .227 CHAPTER 7  Design Considerations for ASP.NET MVC Controllers . . . .253 CHAPTER 8  Customizing ASP.NET MVC Controllers . . . . . . . . .281 CHAPTER 9  Testing and Testability in ASP.NET MVC ...

Still time to register! Course: Exam 70-659: Windows Server 2008 R2, Server Virtualization Jump Start Target Audience: IT Pros with some Microsoft Virtualization experience who want to be sure they're ready to pass exam 70-659 Instructors: Microsoft Technical Evangelist, Symon Perriman & Microsoft Technical Instructor, Philip Helsel Cost: $99 (includes an exam voucher valued at $150 and valid at any Prometric testing center worldwide) Date: Thursday, December 1, 2011 Time: Starts at 22:00 PST (10:00 PM - 06:00 AM PST). Targeting APAC and EMEA time zones . Register Now Why get certified in Microsoft Virtualization? In just three short years, Hyper-V marketshare has grown over 16% (IDC WW Quarterly Server Virtualization Tracker, March 2011). This shift to Microsoft...

Greetings. Since May 2011, Eric Ligman (the Microsoft Director of Partner Experience in the Worldwide Partner Group) has been fine-tuning his “Microsoft Partner Info” Windows Phone app. Here’s a description of it: Microsoft Partner Information, right on your phone. A new social app. Recently, during the Interactive Leadership Forum session we held, we were sharing several social media and online resources we have and are bringing out for partners and one partner asked the question, “I didn’t even know about that resource. How can we keep track of these informational resources?” Not only is that a great question, but how do we take it a step further to go beyond just helping make partners aware of the resources available, but also make it even easier to consume those resources? To that end,...

Check this out: If you are a developer or existing team/startup focused on building a business that takes advantage of the Kinect and Natural User Interface technologies, then the Kinect Accelerator is where you need to be. Through this program, Microsoft is supporting entrepreneurs, engineers and innovators like you to bring to life a wide range of business ideas that leverage the limitless possibilities Kinect enables. Following a competitive screening process, ten finalists will be chosen for this unique three month incubation program running from March to May, 2012 in Seattle, WA. The Kinect Accelerator is “powered by TechStars” using the same mentor-driven methodology pioneered and proven in New York, Boulder, Seattle and Boston. Mentors for the Kinect Accelerator include a broad base...

Here’s the announcement (from November 17): A second, more retail-friendly version of Microsoft Surface is now available for pre-order in 23 countries. Earlier this week, Popular Science named the Samsung SUR40 a 2011 “Best of What’s New” award recipient. Retail outlets looking for new, innovative ways to get hands-on with their customers will soon have a new tool – the Samsung SUR40. Here’s the pre-order page . And here is a specs page .

Some of you might find a recent article in Network World interesting: “Will IT certs get you jobs and raises? Survey says yes” The lead: “In this survey of 700 IT professionals, most say certifications have led to raises and better jobs, busting the myth that certs are nothing but a scam.” Key stats: “Some 60% said a certification led to a new job; 50% said they earned more pay, with 40% saying their pay increased by more than 10% directly because of a certification; and 29% said a cert led to a promotion .” Here’s a quote from early in the article: "I have certifications, and yes they've been a big help to me," says Jeff Schoonmaker, a junior network administrator in Portland, Ore., who has a Cisco CCNA, a Microsoft MCITP (Enterprise Desktop Administrator) and the CompTIA A+. Schoonmaker...

Greetings. As you probably know, Microsoft Press sells ebook versions of our titles via O’Reilly, our distributor. A title’s ebook bundle contains up to five different formats: APK, DAISY, ePub, Mobi, and PDF. The following table does a great job describing and comparing current e-readers across 20 categories, including “Native Formats”: http://paidcontent.org/table/comparing-e-readers-and-tablets-november-2011 E-read on!

Posted by the Microsoft Learning Jump Start Team Microsoft Learning hosted a brand new class in the popular “Jump Start” series back on October 6, 2011. Because we received such rave reviews and demand for more options to take the class, we've added a few new dates and times. For those of you who have been asking for class times more appropriate for APAC and EMEA time zones, please note that the December 1, 2011 class runs from 10:00 PM to 06:00 AM PST! We're excited to see all of you online on December 1! Here are the details: Course: Exam 70-659: Windows Server 2008 R2, Server Virtualization Jump Start Target Audience: IT Pros with some Microsoft Virtualization experience who want to be sure they're ready to pass exam 70-659 Instructors: Microsoft Technical Evangelist...

  Thursday, Nov 17, 2011 Office 365 and Exchange Online Learn how the new Exchange Online service of Office 365 allows you to have access to email, calendar, and contacts from virtually anywhere from your desktop, browser, and mobile devices. 1 PM Pacific Time (9pm - London | 4pm - New York | Fri, Nov 18th at 8am - Sydney | Fri, Nov 18th at 6am - Tokyo | Fri, Nov 18th at 5am - Beijing | Fri, Nov 18th at 2:30am – Mumbai) Register Here Friday, Nov 18, 2011 Create Better Excel 2010 Workbooks More Easily If you're a CIA code breaker or a research scientist working alone in a lab, you might not care what your Excel charts or workbooks look like as long as the numbers are accurate. But for most of us, workbooks we create and share in Excel need to be as visually compelling as the numbers behind...

Microsoft Press is pleased to announce Start Here! , a new series aimed at teaching the basic skills that people completely new to a development language, technology, or product need in order to start programming. The Start Here! series walks readers through the software, tools, techniques, and concepts they need, starting at the very beginning and providing a broad overview of the subject along with hands-on practice exercises, sample projects, and techniques that provide quick results while building expertise. The first two books in this series, Start Here! Learn Microsoft Visual C# 2010 and Start Here! Fundamentals of Microsoft .NET Programming (a free “companion” volume to the C# book), together constitute a new approach to learning programming in general and C# in particular. As John Mueller...

Hello. Andrew Whitechapel, who is working on a book titled Windows Phone 7 Development Internals (Microsoft Press, 2012), has an article in the November 2011 issue of MSDN Magazine called “Building a ‘Mango’ App.” The article describes use of some of the new features in the Windows Phone SDK 7.1 release (released September 25, 2011). Andrew’s article begins like this: “Mango” is the internal code name for the Windows Phone SDK 7.1 release, and of course the name of a delicious tropical fruit. There are many ways you can use mangoes—for example, in pies, salads and a range of cocktails. The mango is also said to provide a number of health benefits, and it has an interesting cultural history. In this article, I’ll examine Mangolicious, a Windows Phone SDK 7.1 application about mangoes. The application...