My colleagues are running a survey on cloud computing and they are interested in your thoughts. If you have some opinions on cloud computing, please consider taking this survey. We value your input and welcome your feedback!

As we are close to wrapping up our latest round of MSDN Unleashed and ArcReady events — and rounding the bend on the first of our MSDN Developer Conference events — the team and I are starting to for the next quarter's events. We're targeting late February or potentially sometime in early- or mid-March.

I thought I would open our planning process up, to a small degree, to you, the developers and software architects in our geography (the exhaustive list of states including Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Minneapolis, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, and Wisconsin). If there is a topic that interests you, and you live in one of the 18 states my team and I cover, please feel free to drop me a note via a comment on my blog. If you feel motivated, please don't hesitate to drop me an email at BriMoore at Microsoft dot com.

The team and I definitely appreciate your feedback. We'll listen to it and do our level best to adapt our plans to your feedback.

Details keep coming together on the MSDN Developer Conference, a local delivery of highlights from the PDC made possible by Microsoft, our partners, and local community leaders (you fine folks!). Join local Microsoft Evangelists and local community luminaries for a recap of Windows Azure, Visual Studio 2010, and our language and platform roadmap. Not only will you have the opportunity to mix and mingle with your peers and colleagues and discuss the events' topics with your local Evangelist, we've got a pretty solid lineup of prizes to raffle off at each event.

Prizes Galore!
First and foremost, we'll be raffling off four Visual Studio Team Suite 2008 with MSDN Premium Subscriptions at each event. That's right, four lucky people will win a MSDN Premium Subscription. This level of MSDN Subscription includes Expression Studio as well as a host of server products, like SQL Server 2008, BizTalk Server, Exchange Server, operating systems, and more — all to help you with the development and testing of robust applications.

Attendees at each event will also be in the running to win one of three Lego NXT Robotics Kits and the WROX Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio book. Other giveaways include a "Gamer Backpack" filled with a handful of Xbox games (Mass Effect, Gears of War 2, Fable II... I hope we have a great spread of great games, many of which I am currently playing myself... in my not-so-copious free time) as well as a "Gadget Backpack" laden with interesting hardware and gadgets that geeks (usually) love, like cutting edge mice or web cams.

Harnessing the Power of the Community (or Vote with your Feet)
We'll also be hosting the Community Courtyard, where attendees can mix, mingle, and talk about whatever they want to talk about. Running in parallel with the sessions, this is an open discussion area where you and your fellow attendees are in charge: you choose the subjects, the participants, and the speakers. Whether you just want to mingle with the presenters, talk about a session, or gab about any other topic, you have the opportunity to do so. Borrowing from the wildly successful Open Space formats, this area is yours.

Event Calendar — Complete with Handy Registration Links

Date	City
12/9/2008	Houston, TX
12/11/2008	Orlando, FL
12/16/2008	Atlanta, GA
1/13/2009	Chicago, IL
1/13/2009	Minneapolis, MN
1/16/2009	Washington, DC
1/20/2009	New York, NY
1/22/2009	Boston, MA
1/22/2009	Detroit, MI
1/26/2009	Dallas, TX
2/19/2009	San Francisco, CA

PDC was, for me, a bit too short. I wasn't originally going to attend and had booked travel accordingly. I stumbled into a pass from one of my colleagues; he had a conflict, so lucky me. I feel guilty for taking his pass... but not too much.

Many things were covered at PDC: Azure, Windows 7, Live Services, Visual Studio 2010 and a much, much more. Here are some of my favorite highlights from PDC.

Extreme Makeover: Logo Edition
Remember Year 2000? Not 'cause of the y2k bug, but because Microsoft unveiled Next Generation Windows Services. Shortly after that, Microsoft announced the Microsoft .NET Framework and revealed a logo that captured the colors of Windows, Office, and our Enterprise Server Products. It nicely captured the idea of the .NET-ification of Microsoft products, servers, technologies, and services. In fact, when I started with Microsoft in October 2000, I often joked that I spent as much time telling people what .NET _was_ as I spent telling them what it _wasn't_.

But, as in all things, the .NET logo grow a bit old and stale. New logos and product came (and, in some cases, went), and the old logo started looking a little tarnished. I felt this was especially the case when we unveiled Silverlight. What a sharp logo! And when you put both the aging .NET Logo and the new, engaging Silverlight logo on a slide together, the difference was stark. At least in my mind. Don't get me wrong, it was a great time, very exciting. I loved that old .NET logo, I loved talking about .NET (and still do).

But at PDC2008 I stumbled across something interesting, a card at the .NET Framework kiosk in the Microsoft Pavilion in the Expo Center. A nifty new .NET Logo, one that looks a little bit like the Silverlight logo, sleek and engaging. It was the first of many micro-WOW! moments for me.

Some Windows 7 Highlights
Admittedly the overview in the keynote was brief. And admittedly I chose to go to other breakout sessions (WPF Roadmap was a highlight for me, personally). But what I saw was fairly engaging, some of it especially for folks that write code, demo or present a lot, or who use a laptop.

• Multi-touch support (engaging new way to interact with your computer, using your fingers, a mouse, or what-not)
• VHD Support in Disk Management Utility
• Win+P Monitor Support (built-in support to toggle monitors)
• Default printer switching (set different default printers for different networks; your "work" default and your "home" default)
• Slider control for UAC (level of sensitiveness)

Some Visual Studio 2010 Highlights
I must admit I had to step out briefly for part of this session, but I did pick up a few nuggets that really interested me...

• Enhanced extensibility (ScottGu did a great demo extending XML comments with formatting — and integrating text from Team Foundation Server Work Items)
• IDE shell rebuilt with WPF
• Multi-monitor support

Numerous Other Highlights
There were too many highlights to count, or for me to remember. My colleagues have all blogged extensively about PDC (see the blogroll to the right). A few highlights...

	— a cloud services operating system that provides development, service hosting and service management environment for the Azure Services Platform
	— makes developing loosely coupled cloud-based applications easier
	— a set of building blocks within the Azure Services Platform for handling user data and application resources

Next Steps
PDC, for me, was short (and this post almost too far removed from the event to be relevant; perhaps my wife _is_ right, and I'm too busy), but there are load of videos on Channel 9 for you to watch.

We also have our MSDN Developer Conference (MDC) events coming up in December and January, bringing PDC (and a dozen outstanding local speakers and Microsoft Evangelists) to a city near you. Houston, TX is first up...

Attend a MDC event and you'll have a chance to win a fabulous prize, such as a LEGO Mindstorms robotics kit or a Visual Studio Team Suite with MSDN Premium Subscription. Yup, four lucky people from each event will have a chance to win the big daddy of Microsoft developer tools: Team Suite with MSDN. More details on the SWAG and prizes for MDC coming in a post, soon. I promise.

Can you tell I'm behind on posting to my blog? Two post in one day is a bit of a shock, even to me. Both posts are short, of course, so that might explain the sudden prolific posting.

Microsoft just recently — earlier this week, in fact — launched BizSpark, a program for software develop startups designed to help them get off the ground quickly and equip them with the tools and technology to help them do so. The goal of BizSpark is simple: accelerate a startup's success by providing access to Microsoft tools and technologies, including production licensing for hosted solutions.

The program includes software, like Visual Studio 2008, Team Foundation Server, Windows Server, SQL Server, Office SharePoint Server, Systems Center, and BizTalk Server, as well as access to support resources _and_ potential visibility to investors, customers, and business partners.

If you are a recently formed startup, or are thinking about forming a startup, check out BizSpark or read the program guide.

I am thrilled to share the news that the St. Louis .NET community has banded together to host the St. Louis Day of .NET on Saturday, December 13 at the Center for the Application of Information Technology at Washington University in St. Louis (here are the directions). Several people from around St. Louis and the surrounding areas will be speaking, including a couple of the folks on my team as well as my peers in Developer & Platform Evangelism.

Topics include:

• Microsoft Windows 7
• Windows Azure and Microsoft's "Cloud Computing" Initiative
• Silverlight
• SharePoint
• Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF)
• Distributed Caching using Microsoft "Velocity"
• The future of C#
• SQL Server 2008

Join the crew for an amazing event. I'll be there, and so should you!