Underbelly has a great chronological timeline of the what was announced at MIX regarding Xbox Live, XNA, Windows Phone 7 development, launch partners, and Silverlight 4! Check it out!

I did an academic presentation at Bucks University hosted by the Istitution of Engineering and Technology.  The presentation was titled “Explaining the Cloud,” and it discussed at a high-level why the cloud represents a shift in how IT systems and applications will evolve.  It also gives a...

Microsoft has kicked in its technology guarantee for customers who are waiting to upgrade to Office 2010 but haven’t upgraded to Office 2007.  The simple thinking is that there is no reason for businesses to delay rolling out and familiarizing themselves with common UI elements like the Ribbon and...

Q: What was announced today? A: Today, Microsoft announced a Release Candidate (RC) for Visual Studio 2010. The RC is available to MSDN subscribers today and will be available to the public on February 10. Microsoft is encouraging developers to download the RC and provide feedback. Q: Why did Microsoft...

I managed to finally import, edit, and clean up the video from The SharePoint EDU Conference that took place back in the Summer 2009 in Birmingham.  There is a heavy SharePoint focus as you can tell by the name.  The content below is one of six videos that were recorded so stay tuned for more...

I’ve been meeting a lot of open-source devs lately and most tend to be genuinely surprised about the ability to now use SQL Server 2005/2008 with PHP applications. The best PHP devs, especially those who own or run development houses, tend to be a platform neutral bunch even those that work almost exclusively...

Its been amazing to see the world community mobilize against the disaster in Haiti.  There isn’t a day that goes by where I see, hear, or read an amazing story about survival and philanthropy.  Microsoft has done a lot in this area to help. “Since we first heard news of the tragedy in Haiti...

If you’ve heard or used our Arc Mouse, we now have a really cool companion item to go with it.  BEHOLD…the Arc Keyboard!    That should hold you guys over until a do a full write-up on the iPad from the Microsoft employee angle out tommorow.  Seriously, Apple is loosing its design...

Taking the audio from the original recording presented during Oxford Geek Night, I created a video of an updated PowerPoint presentation on the topic.

TechNet Webcast: Network Considerations for Deploying Communications Server 2007 R2 (Level 300) Tuesday, February 02, 2010 - 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM Pacific Time Desmond Lee, Senior Consultant, Winworkers Switzerland http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032439126&Culture=en-US...

Sorry, this was too funny not to post!  Well played Mr. Ballmer…well played.  Just out of curiosity, can you perhaps furbish me, employee #318193 with a personally signed version of my Lenovo (I’ll even take a Dell) ?  I know its not a Mac, but I swear it has Windows 7 on it :) Macs get...

Ars Technica has a done some reading in the in the “product use rights” document pertaining to Office 2010 Standard and Professional Plus.  The interesting bit is the wording around Office Web Apps usage.  I’ll admit that this license model is a no-brainer, but then again I work for the company...

Exchange Server in Depth: Master Concepts and Optimize Your Server Environment The latest release of Microsoft Exchange Server can help you achieve better business outcomes while controlling the costs of deployment, administration, and compliance. Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 delivers a wide range...

I presented at London Geek Night a few days ago about the contributions that Microsoft made to the open-source community in 2009.  My presentation was titled, “Hell Froze over, Pigs flew, Microsoft Went Open” Hell Froze Over, Pigs Flew, Microsoft Went Open View more presentations from ukdpe . This...

Sky Player, Sky’s online TV service launches on Windows 7 creating a new and innovative way for people in the UK to watch live and on demand TV from Sky on a PC.  The service is simple and easy to use and gives Windows 7 users access to the wide range of high-quality live and on demand pay TV currently...

TechNet Webcast: Microsoft Virtualization Best Practices for SharePoint (Level 200) Wednesday, December 02, 2009 - 8:00 AM - 9:00 AM Pacific Time Vipul Shah, Senior Product Manager, Microsoft Corporation Tom Brauch, President, Fpweb.net - SharePoint Hosting Pioneer Steve Laux, Product Manager, Fpweb...

There is a lot of noise in the SharePoint world post SharePoint Conference 2009 and PDC.  I’m getting hammered for requests regarding briefings and overviews of the product so I thought I should just make my slides available.  Check it out!   Share Point 2010 Product Overview BETA View...

The world has too much information.  If you query any search engine for any topic, you will likely be greeted by millions of links of results.  Everyone knows that text cannot possibly be the end all, be all of data discovery.  Surely as the volume of unmanaged data grows, which grows...

The idea of using a single machine with multiple simultaneous users is not a new concept.  After all, that is exactly what server admins do all the time with remote desktop and terminal services.  But what hasn’t been as easy to do is give users access to their own desktop environment with...

While I’m really busy tweeting live at this conference, I read a great overview for IT Pros who are interested in SharePoint 2010.  I’m doing more of a dev focus for this conference so if you’re interested, follow me on Twitter @tarpara  See Natalya's post.

What a conference! 7400+ Attendees 150+ Breakout sessions, Hands On Labs, and Chalk Talks 7.5 Miles of Cat5 cable…ironically for the wifi connection The biggest party the Mandalay Bay has ever had! Excellent Bullet Points from Keynote session SharePoint Conference has started stronger than any conference...

Microsoft security experts have never really been fans of SAML, a markup language, that is crucial to many e-government initiatives and SSO models.  The problem with SAML is that it is obese and almost no one had a full implementation of it until recently, yet it was always Microsoft that receive...

WNS140AL: Planning and Deploying Windows Server 2008 R2 and Hyper-V: Part 4 – Plan, Deploy and Manage with the Security Compliance Management Toolkit Beta Presented by Tom Cloward Tuesday, September 29, 2009 8:00-9:00am Pacific Time Click here to calculate your local time This is a joint Microsoft internal...

Microsoft patterns & practices is excited to announce the release of: Developing SharePoint Applications Guidance for building collaborative applications that extend your LOB systems In this e-mail: | Customer Value | What’s in Developing SharePoint Applications | Goals | Getting Started | Videos...

Faster search in Excel Tables and PivotTables Microsoft Excel 2010 gives you new and faster searches in Tables, PivotTables, and AutoFilters with a streamlined way to look through large amounts of data and create new filters. So even if you have a report with more than 1 million items you need to search...