Julia Lerman, who is a big contributor to INETA and to the Vermont .NET User Group , is wondering how her group’s meetings can stay interesting to both beginner and advanced developers . Student user groups and clubs must deal with this all the...

Josh Blake does another blogcast on non-rectangular forms using C# and .NET . Check it out on the Blogcast Repository . --Eric (Grand Valley State University)

The Washington Post is reporting on the U.S. Governments Distributed Network Attack (DNA) is used to crack seized computers for governmental investigation. How do they manage to brute force 256-bit encryption you ask? The answer is you! Humans are no...

This FAQ is a work in progress - we'll keep adding new FAQs as they come in. If you have any questions about the program not answered here or over at the Student Ambassador web site , email us at msa at Microsoft .com. Q: Is this a job? How much money...

David Smith a Microsoft Student Ambassador at Michigan State University asks on his blog whether or not a programming competition could be considered a sport or not. What do you think? --Eric (Grand Valley State University)

Here is an interesting look into Microsoft’s Shared Source Initiative from an ex-Softie, over on O’Reilly’s OnLamp.com . The author highlights some of the projects Microsoft has begun under the initiative, such as WiX over on SourceForge...

Today I sat in on a career and internship meeting for students at the university. I thought overall the meeting was very informative to these students and gave them a lot of insights into what an employer may be looking for. After the meeting a student...

MSN Messenger updated its maximum number of buddies on a contact list from 150 to 300 today. --Eric (Grand Valley State University)

PDC – Professional Developers Conference – is coming up later this year, and it’s always one of the most anticipated developer conferences going. Keep up on the latest news about it via RSS here, or keep up with Microsoft employees who...

Then you should visit Crossfader , a new community site for “the global electronic artist”, courtesy of Microsoft . This is built on the new Community Server code from Telligent Systems – the basic version of which is open source, so...

If you hate the inconvenience of toggling between your Visual Studio IDE and a browser or RSS aggregator, then check out this freeware RSS reader plugin for SharpTools 2.0 . Now you can keep up on Student Flash and all your favoriate Microsoft bloggers...

Is the Microsoft Student Ambassador (MSA) program really worth it? I would have to say yes! The program is an excellent program and you can see other companies such as IBM, Apple, and Sun running similar program. One thing that is unique about the program...

The Microsoft Student Ambassador program is an excellent program that provides students excited about technology ( Microsoft , .NET , C# , VB.NET , Apple , Linux , FreeBSD , Java , PHP , etc...) a way to interact with Microsoft . The Student Ambassador...

Josh Ledgard has a great blog entry where he talks about shared source project by Microsoft employees. He provides links to a bunch of them. Take a look. Perhaps you'll find something useful and want to join the community around one of these projects...

Most of the time you never know where life's going to lead you next. It may lead you down a path you never wished to go, it may lead you to being famous, or maybe something that perked your interest will become a world wide fad. There's a great article...

Josh Blake and a friend put together a great blogcast on using Mono and Linux to run .NET applications. They also show off GTK# and a few other features. Check out the blog cast here . --Eric (Grand Valley State University)

Check out MainFunction.com this is a great site for educators of all classification. What may reallly interest you is the FREE .NET training around the country at various locations, read more about it here ... --Eric (Grand Valley State University)

One thing we are often asked about is how can college students, who are aspiring to enter the working world as a developer, start getting connected with job opportunities in there area? There are LOTS of ways to do this online – start up a blog...

As many of you know the Visual Gaming event in the Imagine Cup uses "tissues" which are the maze that the nano robots have to move through. There is a contest for people to create their own tissues that can be used in round two. You do not have to be...

Richard has posted some drafts of the new Project Hoshimi manga at theSpoke . Images only - no dialog. Still I wonder what clues you can find there. If you are into the Imagine Cup Visual Gaming event you will want to check these out. Alfred (Microsoft...

Have you seen the experimental web-based blog reader from MSN? It is at www.start.com/1/ It has a bunch of links that you can add automatically to connect with some of the top blogs and other RSS feeds on the Internet. There is an interesting looking...

Microsoft runs a portal site where Microsoft employees register their blogs. When a Microsoft person updates their blog this site shows an update. It lists the last several Microsoft blogs updated. You can do to the next page to browse through more recent...

Students – a question for you all. What would you like us to cover in this blog (or over on the e-newsletter)? Our goal so far has been to do two things: 1. Cover some of the things going on at Microsoft that are of interest to student developers...

Josh Blake a Student Ambassador from James Madison University just wrote about his recent experience with the m200 . --Eric (Grand Valley State University)

Julia Lerman pointed out a great new column by MSDN staffer Betsy Aoki, on Visual Basic for Newbies. The first post is entitled “Don’t Freak Out About Visual Studio ”. If you’re just getting started and the whole thing intimidates...