You can now sessions from the Microsoft Windows 8 Anchor event on Channel 9!

On April 23rd 2012, the Microsoft Evangelism team on the West Coast will join together and present on the topic of Windows 8 and how to start developing for the new platform.  Be sure to follow all the action with this twitter hash-tag #win8appdev.

For more information about this event, check out this blog post from Scott Kerfoot.

Here is a simple JavaScript RegEx pattern for extracting any URL that begins with htttp:

<script type="text/javascript">

// example string, looks like a tweet to me :)
var str="Awesome resources for HTML5! http://bit.ly/palermo4html5 #HTML5";

// could also be written as:
// var regexUrl = new RegExp("http.[^\s]+", "gi");
var regexUrl=/http.[^\s]+/gi;

// if a match is found, the return type is an array of matches
document.write(str.match(regexUrl));

// output of above line of code:
// http://bit.ly/palermo4html5

</script>

Curious about the changes in HTML5?  The W3C recently published an online reference to easily define the deltas. 
This reference has been added to the popular HTML5 resources on this site  

If you receive the following error in Visual Studio…

“Unable to activate Windows Metro style application”

… or a similar error in Blend…

“Unable to activate application --- on the Local Machine”

… the quickest fix is to delete the contents of the bin directory and rebuild the project.

[click here for a listing of all my courses at Pluralsight]

Congratulations to all the Microsoft MVPs of the Year!

Two of the MVPs are based right here in Arizona.

Joseph Guadagno was awarded MVP of the Year for C#.  Joe has been an ongoing contributor to the community through is efforts with the Southeast Valley DotNet User Groug (SEVDNUG), Desert Code Camp, AZGiveCamp, and as President of INETA North America (just to name a few).

Joe works full time (like most of us) and still manages to contribute so much to the community.  Congratulations to Joe for being recognized by Microsoft and by his peers a “leader by example” among MVPs.

Scott Cate was awarded MVP of the Year for ASP.NET.  Scott is well known in the Arizona community.  Scott is a long-time user group leader, and is the founder of AZGroups.org, a site dedicated to listing all the technical user groups (regardless of platform) in Arizona as a service to developers.  Last year, Scott was awarded the title – Microsoft Regional Director.  Scott has been quite active in the southwest region of the USA promoting the Windows Phone Unleashed events.  He is a regular speaker at many technical events locally, nationally, even internationally.

Despite his busy schedule, Scott is devoted family man – always beaming with pride over his children.  Kudos to Scott for being recognized with such a high honor (though no surprise for those who know him).

If you have benefited from the hard work of either of these gentlemen, please enter your comment here.

The most anticipated movie of the year hits theaters this Friday, March 23rd – The Hunger Games.  If you have read the book (or trilogy), you are probably giddy with excitement to see your favorite characters come to life on screen in a somewhat morbid view of a fictional world of the future.

If you are a fan, you are invited to take the Capitol Tour!  Sign in today to see which district you belong to.  Myself?  Of course I was assigned to District 4.

I love the new logo for Windows 8!  Learn more at the Windows Team Blog.