Spring brings not only rain and flowers (you know, April shows and May flowers), it also brings our spring technical events. And this time our technical events are taking on a slightly different form. Okay, to be completely honest, we are still calling the sessions ArcReady (our event for architects and those who want to become architects), MSDN Events Unleashed (for the developer), and the new TechNet Events Unleashed (for the IT Professional). But we are also doing something different for the spring

Usually we discuss hurricane or typhoon force winds in the warm tropical climates of the world. Well, unless you haven't been paying attention, Seattle and surrounding areas got hammered about 24 hours ago and a lot of essential services are still being affected. People got killed and the area will take days to recover. I am sad about that. From an IT perspective, it's been interesting to watch from 1600 miles away. It has effected some of our services. We canceled the webcasts on Friday. My blog

Do you ever look to the past to see what the future holds? You should. I cut my computer teeth long before most people. My computer heritage goes back to my diapers. Dear Dad was a career IBMer and I was playing with IBM Selectric typewriters and dictaphones long before most people had ever seen Lotus 1-2-3 . During a recent discussion with Rodney Clark, a rising Microsoft executive and the leader of my org, I found out he and I have very similar roots in that regard. His Dad was also a career IBMer.

Get your frozen margarita, dual core laptop and favorite rubber ducky and head to the pool. Might as well since this year you’ll be able to watch and listen to the festivities on the http://VirtualTechEd.com website. It’ll be interesting to see how much of the show, seminars and “social” events are actually broadcast. I would recommend tuning into the opening keynote on 6/11 at 7pm EST. We’ll have Ray Ozzie, Bob Muglia and Chris Capossela showing off some kewl stuff.

So I missed the date by a few hours, but you can help us bring the internet to it’s knees by downloading Windows Vista Beta 2 today!!! Ok, depending on your connection, maybe not today but hopefully shortly there after. After the download is complete burn the .iso image to DVD and you’ll have a shiny new operating system to test. Go to http://www.microsoft.com/windowsvista/getready/preview.mspx and decide if you want to order the DVD kit or download the bits right now. As you can see,

Well I got all excited… I was poking around on the MSDN developer site and noticed they have this enticing link to become a member of the Windows Vista Beta program called the Windows Vista Beta Experience . The link takes you to a site where you can pick your country. Of course I looked for the country of Texas and to my horror it wasn’t listed. So I picked the United States and ended up at http://www.microsoft.com/betaexperience/enus/ . On that page they have a registration link that

As you’ll recall, I posted a preliminary version of the Windows Vista Product Guide (also known as “The Book of Windows Vista”) a few weeks ago. It was in .xps form and initial feedback was very good. However, in order to view and print the must have information, you needed to install WinFX . XPS is the XML Paper Specification. Well, we got some good critical feedback and guess what, we listened. Now, you can download this puppy in Microsoft word or XPS format. Careful though, it’s

Somebody has been doing some very nice work on microsoft.com. Take a close look at http://www.microsoft.com/rss/default.aspx . We’re starting to get our act togethor on the plethora of content you can suck into your machine via RSS. We have all kinds of nice little categories for developers, IT Pros ( the most stressful job in the world ), home users, etc. And of course, you’ll find this blog sprinkled across some of those categories. What I didn’t see was a category for podcasts

There has been a raging debate inside and outside of Microsoft about the new security feature in Windows Vista called UAC. UAC stands for User Account Control. The debate has raged mostly about the effectiveness of the feature. Do a search on www.live.com for vista uac and you’ll see what I mean. The mainstream press has even decided this topic is worthy of “debate”. By effectiveness, I mean that most of the negative articles mention that your are prompted so often for elevation