Today at the PDC we are making available the first preview release of the Azure Services Training Kit.  The Azure Services Training Kit will include hands-on labs, presentations, and samples to help you understand how to build applications that utilize...

  One of the key things that got announced yesterday were details about the next release of Windows Server 2008. Called Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2, it will build on the features and capabilities of the current Windows Server 2008 release version...

Wow. The Day 2 keynote was pretty amazing and I am sure that I am going to forget something in my mental recap. Here goes. 1st, Steven Sinofsky unveiled Windows 7. There is a lot of new stuff and there was a great reaction from the audience to this. Here...

Ben has posted a blog which provides some insight into some of the features coming in CRM 5 together with an interview with the product team ( below). In the interview they talk about the programmability and the developer experience that people should...

Kim Cameron gave a session today with some pretty big announcements around Microsoft's Identity Vision. He talked about a single open model for identity that enables user choice in the use of their identities . As before, the Microsoft identity model...

At 12 noon PST, the Technical Preview of Windows Azure is open. The full cloud experience is only going to be open for participants at the PDC, but that does not mean that you can not get started writing and debugging your code. By going to www.azure...

Im here in the keynote at the PDC and Ray Ozzie has just announced the new cloud platform which is called Microsoft Azure It is basically made up of three levels Windows Azure which provides the key operating system features for the cloud. The key parts...

Ahead of the PDC, "Microsoft .NET" has stepped out into the limelight sporting a new logo. The old one has been around for the last 8 years or so and with the  the broad adoption of the Microsoft .NET technology on the PC, Web Server, Mobile...

As described on EDGE , System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) released to manufacture(RTM) this week which is going to be another huge step for making Virtualization more common place in the enterprise. One of the key issues that ITPROs told us...

Netbooks, Strata, Cloud, etc, etc , even Office14 .  Everybody has been pre-guessing what the story will be at the PDC this year. The great thing is that we do not have too long to wait.  

Eugenio Pace and Gianpaolo Carraro from the architect team have just published and article in the latest Architect Journal ( #17) which is entitled " Head in the Cloud, Feet on the Ground " which talks about the possibilities of the moving IT assets from...

There was a report out from IDC late last week which provides a great summary of the Virtualization business. The key number that I was surprised by, was that Hyper-V has already taken 23% of the Virtualization market for new machines in its first quarter...

Keith spotted this new promotion from Bungie for the Fall of 2009. Can’t wait. Halo 3 Recon - the saga continues

There is a lot more information becoming available of the Parallel frameworks in .NET 4.0. Here are some of the latest posts on the subject. One of the coolest screen casts you will want to see is from Jason Olson who talks about Race Conditions and...

Steve Ballmer was at Gartner's Symposium/ITxpo conference today, talking about a number of issues. The big question was about Vista deployments and what should companies do. He answered by saying that the adoption rate for Vista, is two times that of...

Silverlight 2 shipped today. Silverlight 2 is a cross-platform browser plugin that enables rich media experiences and .NET (Rich Internet Applications) within the browser. Its also pretty small in size ( ~4.6MB) and takes only a few seconds to install...

The old king is dead, long live the king… or so they say. On the Vista blog site, Mike Nash has just announced that the next release of Windows, which is currently codenamed “Windows 7” will in fact be called “Windows 7” in the final release.

Busy day. A new open source project “Eclipse Tools for Silverlight” - http://www.eclipse4sl.org/ has just been announced. Full details can be found here. http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2008/oct08/10-13Silverlight2PR.mspx . This will bring the...

Well at this time in two weeks, the first PDC keynote will just be about to start. I personally can not wait for it to kick off. Even in these tough times it looks highly likely that we are still going to sell out and I believe that the attendees will...

They have taken there time ( I believe that I heard about this almost a year ago ), but MySpace has now entered the Ad Market with their MyAds offering. This seems pretty similar to what FaceBook have, but unlike Facebook (only allows text ads today)...

A week ago we were all pondering the implications on the 700bn$ rescue package that the US government was planning to vote on. At the time there was hope that this could turn things around…. It was pretty clear to me that it was the end of the beginning...

The team that brought you Flight Simulator has been working for a while to separate the core simulation engine away from the packaged product so that it can be used in other applications that require real world simulation. Out of this came Microsoft ESP...

Joey recently spoke with Mai-Lan Tomsen Bukovec who is a Group Program Manager for IIS. They talked about a number of new extensions for IIS that are being released to the web such as the URL-Rewrite and some very cool new media extensions for those of...

Chris Henley put together a really detailed screen cast on Group Policy Preferences which is a key feature which came out in Windows Server 2008. This makes it possible to setup computer or user settings without necessarily knowing how to script them...

5 Years after the "Boy Band" culture was lost forever, the PDC team are looking to bring in back. PDC 2008 is coming… and I can’t wait! I can't wait.......   P.S. If you thought that being a developer evangelist was...