As previously mentioned I’m off to BarCamp Liverpool this weekend and this page will act as a landing site for attendees who follow the URL that will be on their beer tokens :) There are a number of useful resources for BarCamp folks i think/hope

• Get a tonne of Microsoft software for a few quid with BizSpark. Tools, servers, database and our cloud platform. there are some entry criteria but if you want access to literally thousands of pounds of software, this is the program for you. It’s not just software though, there is also support - via MSDN (two support incidents per startup) access to Network Partner and global visibility - via BizSparkDB.

• Microsoft's open source project hosting web site is CodePlex. Start a new project, join an existing one, or download software created by the community. Basically tonnes of code, ready to share and be shared. Microsoft? yeah….serious.

• If you’re interested in cloud computing stuff, Windows Azure and Azure Services Platform may be of interest Windows in the cloud, SQL, identity, storage, compute, social networking building blocks. In a nutshell this is what I’d play with if I wanted to build the new Facebook….which I don’t incidentally.

• Get an entire Web Platform includes link to the Web Platform Installer which auto configures a machine for building and running web applications on Windows in ASP.NET or PHP

I’ll keep adding more stuff here but I also wanted to add two things which may be common questions I get this weekend to answer the question or observation about why the hell I’m there. 3 reasons

1. I love Liverpool
2. I love Microsoft
3. I love getting outside of the echo chamber/borg

please don’t shoot me…. :)