So I downloaded the desktop sidebar and I like the email panel a lot. However I wish it had better integration with Outlook - in that it could actually delete emails from outlook and could do a multi-select delete. Anyone know how it works? I believe...

In case you didnt see it, Luca has posted on our PDC sessions. Lots of cool new language stuff... http://blogs.msdn.com/lucabol/archive/2005/07/14/438824.aspx

We are holding a compatibility competition, to get the last couple of bugs out of the product before it ships! Compatibility for our customers is one of our top priorities for this release – we'd like to make sure your experience on the new runtime and...

I've resisted the urge to get an Ipod for so long, but this nearly made me change my mind. I'm hovering dangerously on the edge here...

We just released the Card Game starter kit, a new starter kit for Beta2 here . Its a blackjack game...check it out! Karen on our team has been hard at work getting this out of the door and fixing bugs in it all week. The VB version will be releasing soon...

Short status today... These last two weeks have been a whirlwind ride for our team. We made a huge dent in our bugs to hit our goals for last week. We incentivized the dev team with late night dinners and they pulled through magnificently, fixing a...

Engadget, a cool tech blog I'm just discovering has an interview with Steve Ballmer and Robbie Back about Xbox 360. Check it out here . Overall I think Steve kept his cards close to his chest. I've been fascinated by all the developing news around comparisons...

So my name tends to be unusual for most people. Shaykat. Its tough for people to pronounce initially (say Share-cut, then repeat but drop the r). However I've noticed an unusual trend recently. People in email type my name as Skaykat. Why? The keyboard...

Last week we rocked on bugs. The dev team kicked it up a notch and started fixing bugs to hit their goals. Along with that we fixed all our bugs that were marked Pri1 and opened greater than 48 hours than Friday. It was pretty cool. On the downside...

Ever seen the error in the title...the one that happens when you rebuild your project in VS and it says: Error 1 Could not write to output file Foo.exe' -- 'The process cannot access the file because it is being used by another process. ' This is...

Our IDE team is having a community chat in an hour from now (1.00 PM P.S.T)! These are the guys who added refactoring to the C# editor, thought about and added all sorts of cool new intellisense features, snippets to the editor etc. I wont give away too...

Wowie zowie, what a fun week we have ahead of us. Yesterday, our release folks came to a collective decision that yes, we are slightly off track on our bug goals - enough to be a concern but not alarming. We sat around & discussed corrective measures...

Rusty, our test manager takes care of managing our customer feedback bugs from the MSDN product feedback center. He has a great post here on our stats. He compares the fixes we made for customer bugs vs. internal bugs and its interesting to see those...

C# status skipped a week last week. Sorry about that. Mon and Tues of last week, we had the C# Strategic Design Review (SDR), where we bring in a couple of customers from different parts of the industry and show them general ideas about where we want...

We now prop C# team member blogs on the front page of our Dev Center . This is a quick insight into the blog thoughts of our team. If you want to see more than 4 posts, go to our team blogs page here . Also, thanks to Rifat Yavuz for noticing some...

Another change that occurred with the release of Whidbey Beta2 is that the C# dev center was updated as well. One of the updates was to create a page of videos about C# and related topics. We thought it would be a good idea to have one page with C# presentations...

So how do you like Beta2 so far? One of our goals this cycle is to get your feedback early! We are already rolling towards our RTM milestone and the earlier we get feedback, the faster we can shut down the product, get it to a high quality and get it...

I just read this article on Wired on google maps. The article basically states that Googles satellite maps captures unusual events - a 747 landing in Tokyo airport, a icebreaker pushing a submarine...kinda cool. I'm going to spend some time looking for...

Scott Nonnenberg is running another chat next Thursday. The theme is the language - come and ask your favorite questions about the language. More details are here . In general we schedule about 2 chats a month, and our attendance numbers show about...

BTW - for all who suggested new tools in my old blog post , the page has been updated with your suggestions. Thank you! Your suggestions were great. I'll send out another round of requests in a month or so... Shaykat

A number of people have asked about Beta2 and I've seen discussion about it. Im trying to figure out how much I can talk about it and in how much detail...but its close. Our team has been working hard to meet its bug goal for this week. While techinically...

We have a free online course to help Java developers migrate to .NET... Check out the workshop at http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/java/migrate/workshop/ or read more about it at https://blogs.msdn.com/briankel/archive/2005/04/07/Brian.aspx

One of my responsibilities on the team is to manage our community process. In C# we put an emphasis on having our team interact with the community - external customers, MVPs, internal users etc. We find that this brings our team closer to the customer...

Ahh, April appears followed by a week of downpour. Hordes of my friends disappeared this weekend to the slopes of Baker and Whistler, while I decided to run and play a bunch of sports instead. April seems like a nice fresh start on the C# team. Last week...

Our bug counts finally dropped off in Beta2 and we hit a big 0 today. Jay has been ecstatic all day - if he could I bet he'd have one of those buttons you pin to your lapel and it would say "Ask me what our bug count in Beta2 is today!". We've had a couple...