After the huge success of the last Virtual Tech Days (We had over 28,000 hours of live webcasts watched by Developers and IT Pros), we thought we should do it more often. So our team at Microsoft India is doing another Virtual Tech Days event for all of you. Its bigger and hopefully better than last time. It is scheduled for Sep 17, 18 and 19.

You can find details of the agenda, speakers and of course register at www.VirtualTechDays.com. We have tried to focus on topics and content which are current and much more relevant to you. I hope you find it useful. Do give us your feedback (through the feedback facility on the site, or alternately on my blog).

On a related note, we recently launched www.ConnectWithLife.co.in. It is an attempt to provide tools and learning resources to help you be be more productive in your work and save time. So you can spend your spare time doing things beyond work. I know that a lot of you face poor work-life balance, having to spend endless evenings, nights and weekends in office. We are trying to give you the technical support, help and resources that will hopefully let you do your work faster and better. Do let me know what you think about the collection of resources we have for you. Check out all the 'How Do I?' videos for sure. I think they are an amazing set of 10 to 15 minute videos for hundreds of small development tasks.

Hope to see all of you at Virtual Tech Days.

Enjoy the weekend!

Just last night, the Live Mesh team announced that Live Mesh Tech Preview is being extended to India.

I am very excited about this. Enough accounts are available currently and there is no wait-list so I encourage you to try it out immediately.

I have been using Live Mesh over the last one month, and I can't tell you how easy it has become to manage my personal documents.

Some of you (Just over 13,000 Developers and IT Professionals) joined us for Virtual Tech Days.

I thought it was a phenomenal success, with 32 in-depth technical sessions delivered by some of the best experts from Microsoft on Visual Studio 2008, SQL Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008. And 'Mashup with Mandira Bedi' added just the right amount of fun to the technical event.

The recordings of the webcasts as well as the PPTs of the sessions are now available.

Do drop a line and tell us what you thought about the event. As always, your feedback is most welcome.

Vinod Kumar M, who is our technology evangelist focusing on SQL Server wants to hear from you. He is planning on doing session on SQL Server and wants to know what topics you would like him to cover. Do give your suggestions to him.

Clare from InnerWorkings dropped a note last week about free Visual Studio 2008 e-Learning that they are offering.

More details here.

I am just back from a hectic week of traveling around the country for the launch events. In case any of you missed attending the launch of Visual Studio 2008, SQL Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008, there is still a lot of good news for you.

Microsoft learning partners NIIT, Aptech, IIHT, CMS, Karrox, HCL and Rooman, are offering free 1-day 'First Look' trainings on each of these products. These First Look Clinics are being offered by these fine learning partners in over 70 cities across the country on March 15, 23 and 29.

We've consistently received feedback that we dont do enough for developers and IT Pros who are in Tier-2 cities which are emerging software and IT hubs. This is an attempt at reaching out to those developers and offering them support.

Register at www.HeroesHappenHere.co.in/FirstLook

In case you haven't already, do register for the VS 2008 launch event. Its going to happen in Bangalore, Mumbai and Delhi. The events are scheduled to be held in movie theaters, so a lot of fun is assured!

More details here.

We convinced Soma to be the keynote speaker in India. He is the man behind Visual Studio, so don't miss it.

I'll be there, so you can meet me too :)

Steve Guggenheimer or Guggs, as he is popularly known at Microsoft, was heading Application Platform and Developer Marketing at Microsoft. Some of you may remember his keynote at TechMela last year. I thought it was one of the best keynotes I had heard in a long time.

You can watch his interview in the CNBC episode which covered TechMela. It starts at the 7:30 minute point.

InnerWorkings is giving out 10 hours of .NET hands on training and I encourage you to try it out.

I have played around a little bit with the InnerWorkings application a couple of months back, and I thought of it as a great way to learn specific .NET skills. The application is integrated with your Visual Studio IDE and there are development tasks that you can work on and InnerWorkings will guide and evaluate you.

Hope this helps.

I wanted to give you all a quick update that we are scheduling a number of webcasts on Visual Studio 2008, SQL Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 starting Feb-18.

These will be delivered by evangelists from Microsoft India as well as external experts. You can register here. The Windows Server 2008 webcasts are listed under the IT Pro tab.

You'll get an in-depth preview of these products that are going to be launched later this month. Great way to build up your skills on these three products.

Watch out for more announcements around these launch products. There are a LOT of activities planned!

Wonder if you saw this fun Facebook application we launched recently. We launched this as a part of the Heroes Happen Here campaign in India. And it has really caught on with Developers. Its cool, isn't it? Let me know if you liked it :)

On the down side, I was hoping for a lot more people to vote for me as a 'Database ka Don'. Even my wife didnt think I was a good enough developer anymore!

Just saw this really cool marketing campaign.

Did you know that there is only one Windows Server 2003 on Microsoft.com today? The rest have all upgraded to Windows Server 2008. And the one left out is feeling really dejected :)

Check it out - http://blogs.technet.com/windowsserver/pages/about-lone-server.aspx 

I stumbled across this article on ZDNet. And I kind of agreed with it. What do you think?

When I reflect back and look at the years when I was a developer, I distinctly remember the people with better people skills, and those people always had an edge in their career. Developers have as much need for soft skills as technical skills. Specially considering the global delivery model that Indian developers work in.

Which got some of us thinking... why does MSDN only offer technical content to developers. Why dont we offer soft skills learning to developers? We already have a lot of soft skills content which our developer employees use. We thought it would be great to share it with all developers worldwide.

So we recently launched MSDN Success Builder. A repository of excellent soft skills content on Leadership, Project Management, Communication, Team Dynamics and Professional & Personal growth.

Thanks are due to Eileen, who enabled this for us.

Hope you enjoy this. I'd love to hear from you on what you think about MSDN Success Builder and what else we could do to improve it.

So here I am. Finally on the world wide web.

This blog is going to be for software developers by a software developer (well... at least I used to be a software developer a few years ago).

Just like Freud (and every husband in the world including me) spent years trying to find an answer to the question "What Women Want", we at Microsoft have spent many person-years trying to understand what software developers want. We do a lot of surveys, focus groups, UX research, ethnographic research and broad market research to better understand developers' needs and requirements and the result of all of this is a wonderful set of tools, technologies and products like the .NET framework and the soon to be launched Visual Studio 2008. We also support software developers with world-class technical resources through the Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN).

Over the next few weeks, I will blog about the different resources available on MSDN that help developers be more productive... and that means more time with your girlfriends/boyfriends, wives/husbands or XBOXs :).  But that's assuming that you do want more time with your significant other (even if it is an XBOX). Or maybe not. Maybe you are the one of the passionate techies who like to build their own games. We've got it all.

So tell us what excites you. We would like to know you better. And that's why this blog. Through this blog, I will make an effort to speak to you, dear Indian developers. Feel free to comment to my posts and tell me what you think, what you need, what you would like Microsoft to do for you, (and stop doing!). Be assured, your voice is being heard.

-Siddharth